SOFAR
Persea Books, coming August 25, 2025
Preorder at: Persea | Bookshop.org | Amazon
In SOFAR, poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield attends our current ecological and historic moment, her decades-long queer love, a life time of work on boats, and her body’s shifting currents with wry yearning and linguistic delight. SOFAR is an acronym for the “sound frequency and ranging channel,” a deep layer of oceanic water that enables sound to travel vast distances, and, drawing upon her deep knowledge and experience of the sea, Bradfield plumbs what can be heard by listening across the vast distances of our lives―within our memories and larger histories, between strangers and beloveds, and to the more-than-human world. Bradfield’s work as a naturalist gives an earned intimacy and nuanced authority to her eco-grief, field observations, and metaphoric leaps as she regards whales, cusk eels, and storm petrels. These are the poems of a woman unafraid of navigating the depths and rip currents she moves through.
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 and alongside whales, sharks, seals, birds, and even 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
- "At the Smallpox Cemetery, Provincetown," Ploughshares
- Poem & Essay: "In the Presence of Shadows: A Meditation" in Campfire Stories: Cape Cod – Tales & Travel Companion, Mountaineers, 2025
SOFAR: Poems
Persea Books, 2025
ISBN: 978-0892556182
$18, 100 pages