Many Ways to Say It

Saulitis, Eva

ISBN 10: 1597092428 / ISBN 13: 9781597092425

Published by Red Hen Press, 2012

Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G1597092428I3N00

Synopsis:

Many Ways to Say It, a collection of lyric poems, is a series of prayers, cries, dispatches, observational records, secret messages, weather reports, daily logs, love poems, trespasses, confessions, letters, and songs. A trained marine biologist, Eva Saulitis uses poetry as a tool to push past the laws of biology—objectivity and detachment—to get as close as she can get to the harsh inner and outer place she calls home. Though chosen, for her, place requires constant re-negotiation and exploration. Living for more than two decades in coastal Alaska is like an arranged marriage, rife with ambivalence and risk, desire and loss. The poems portray the difficult process of this kind of marriage, of "marrying this chunk of earth / the seasons, mud, and crack-up." Close observation of natural phenomena is both the poetĘs and the biologistĘs method. Thus these poems are dispatches from inner and outer wilderness: white-outs, mountain tops, swamps, muskegs, ecotones, and woods. The lover, a second character in the poems, is human and animal, flesh and mineral, mind and earth, heart and weather. Ultimately, Many Ways to Say It is an unscientific investigation into the wild animal that is the self, its contradictions, urges, demands, and terrors, and its desire for self-definition. But it is only by studying the wild without—through encounters with, say, a moose, a mountain, a coyote, a pond—that the poet comes to terms with the wild, and untouchable, within.

About the Author:

Eva Saulitis, an essayist, poet, and marine biologist, has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Alaska for 25 years. Her first book, Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2008), was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Non-Fiction Prize and the ForeWord Book Award. Her second non-fiction book, Into Great Silence, is forthcoming from Beacon Press. A recipient of writing fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska State Council on the Arts, she is an associate professor in the University of Alaska Low-Residency MFA program.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Many Ways to Say It
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: 2012
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket