Oceanic
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"Nezhukumatathil’s poems contain elegant twists of a very sharp knife. She writes about the natural world and how we live in it, filling each poem, each page with a true sense of wonder." —Roxane Gay
“Cultural strands are woven into the DNA of her strange, lush... poems. Aphorisms...from another dimension.” —The New York Times
“With unparalleled ease, she’s able to weave each intriguing detail into a nuanced, thought-provoking poem that also reads like a startling modern-day fable.” —The Poetry Foundation
“How wonderful to watch a writer who was already among the best young poets get even better!” —Terrance Hayes
With inquisitive flair, Aimee Nezhukumatathil creates a thorough registry of the earth’s wonderful and terrible magic. In her fourth collection of poetry, she studies forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself. She brings to life a father penguin, a C-section scar, and the Niagara Falls with a powerful force of reverence for life and living things. With an encyclopedic range of subjects and unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong.
From “Starfish and Coffee”:
And that’s how you feel after tumbling
like sea stars on the ocean floor over each other.
A night where it doesn’t matter
which are arms or which are legs
or what radiates and how—
only your centers stuck together.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four collections of poetry. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the prestigious Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, Nezhukumatathil teaches creative writing and environmental literature in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Every thicket has/ a secret and/ every mighty beast/ has a soft underside," writes Nezhukumatathil (Lucky Fish); it's something of a thesis for this book, in which she marvels at existence in a sprawling and miraculous world. Her poems invoke a sense of connectedness with similar animal species ("the movement we make when/ we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face"), while also reminding readers of what there is to glean even from wildly different creatures: "A snake heart can slide up and down the length of its body/ when it needs to." Nezhukumatathil weaves meditations on parenting and family-making among her lavishly rendered evocations of flora and fauna. In the love song "Penguin Valentine," a male penguin waits for his partner in the dark, incubating their egg: "During those days of no sun, does he/ remember the particular bend// of his mate's neck, that hint of yellow/ near her ears?" Considered together, Nezhukumatathil's poems ponder the nature of home, both in terms of individual lives and of broader human existence. "I have been studying the word home,/ as if studying for a quiz, trying to guess/ answers to questions before they are asked," she writes. The collection's mix of free and formal poems strikes different moods, but throughout Nezhukumatathil's voice is consistent in its awe.
