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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