SOFAR
Persea Books, coming August 25, 2025
Taking its title from the acronym for the "sound frequency and ranging channel," a deep layer of oceanic water that enables sound to travel vast distances, Elizabeth Bradfield's sixth poetry collection draws on her knowledge of the sea, plumbing what can be heard by listening across the vast distances of our lives-and to strangers, beloveds, and the more-than-human world.
Elizabeth Bradfield’s SOFAR is a sounding—both call and measurement. In this deeply felt collection, Bradfield charts a history of love, longing, and a life lived aboard boats, alongside whales, sharks, seals, coyotes. These are poems of place, poems of the heart, and they ring with such tenderness, such longing, they raise in this reader an echoing ache.
—Donika Kelly, author of Bestiary and The Renunciations
Some POEMS from SOFAR
- "Touchy," The Atlantic Monthly
- "Plastic: A Personal History," Poetry Magazine, The Sun
- "Learning to Swim," Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets
- "Swaddled, No Matter," Quarterly West
- "Permeable" and "When One Known to You Dies, the Rearranging of Space and Time Begins" Soundcloud recording from Kenyon Review
- "Drone," Green Humanities Review
- "Sissy-Fists," Plume (part of a collective feature)
- "Silver Hake," "Held/Treasured/Secret," "Identification," "Fulcrum," and "Dispatch from This Summer," About Place Journal (various issues)
- "Origin Story, Re-Wrought," Northwest Review
- "Erratic" and "The California Coast," Alaska Quarterly Review
