Overview

Her Sea-filled Arms: Layers of Blue shares poems that drop down through the blue colors of the Canary Islands off of Portugal, to Cape Verde off of Africa, across the Atlantic Ocean through the Caribbean, over to the Dominican Republic and into Guatemala with a family of six on a sailboat called Selkie. The water sparkles and swallows, and their arms reach and breathe. The galaxy becomes their nest, and the children complex planets. The author, Magdalena Hirt, captures wind, stretches sails, raises sailors, doges squalls, harnesses life, moves with moonlight, whispers with depths, floats with phosphorescence, contemplates earth, holds mystery, listens to waves tell stories, swings with memories, and falls madly in love.

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Reviews

"In Maggie Hirt's second gathering of seafaring poems Her Sea-filled Arms: Layers of Blue, the narrator ""wake[s] dreaming of poets halfway to somewhere in their lives reading poetry in a green space..."" Hirt's space is sky and water in endless motion, her family of five rounding the planet ocean-by-ocean, guided by moon and stars, powered by wind and waves. I love these poems, at once intimate and small as the confines of Selkie and the hungers of children, and vast and awesome as the depths of oceans beneath and the cosmic constellations overhead.-Joel Lipman, Emeritus ""Can you feel the ocean breathe on your / body?"" asks Maggie Hirt in Her Sea-filled Arms: Layers of Blue. Reading this collection, you can't help but answer yes. Hirt's poems explore how the speaker and her family chart their own course, making a life at sea. While mapping this journey across the Atlantic (and beyond), the poems offer layers an atlas cannot-of the sea at night and the way a mother, a partner, a strong-spirit navigates the ocean's beauties and dangers. These poems are a reminder of the most elemental of worlds-ocean, voyage, family-and a reminder that home is a place we create with others through wonder and bravery. Here, we find balance in motion, and even the ""Squalls / are shepherds herding us towards home."" -Laura Donnelly, author of Midwest Gothic In Maggie Hirt's tour de ocean, Her Sea-filled Arms: Layers of Blue, we live aboard the sailing vessel Selkie journeying through the vast openness, experiencing wave after wave of water and daily life with her husband and gaggle of children, each, as children do, needing and are determined not to need ""Mom."" In ""Not Tonight,"" Hirt writes ""What does the ocean have in mind for us?/Strange lack of control-a genie in a bottle-a climber/without a rope. Will I see reason or feel joy? Not tonight."" Maggie Hirt is a poet whose artistry takes us into what it feels like when a wave all but capsizes everything, what a mother feels seeing her children discover wonders far below the ocean's surface, feels when mothering a sick child far from medical aid and at sea literally and metaphorically during a pandemic. To compose with the ability to use self not to draw attention, but self as that mysterious center where experience arrives, takes intelligent sensitivity and artistic integrity. In Hirt's varied poems you will know what it means, what it feels like, to live far from the sight of what we reliably rest our feet on. And you will see what we now seldom see-the night sky. Life away from all reliability except for what's aboard brings mother and wife Maggie to imagine writing ""the note I'll leave in the cockpit./Don't worry, it will say. The Caribbean/Sea knows what to do with me, it told/me so."" And then to realize that ""we have sacrificed/time and togetherness to be even/closer together, to remain madly in love.""-Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, named by ForeWord Reviews/Indie Press Poetry Book of the Year"

Author Information

Magdalena Louise Hirt has a Master of Arts in English Literature from the University of Toledo and is currently working to receive her Master of Letters from the University of Highlands and Islands for Scottish Highland and Islands Literature.Magdalena has multiple published articles in Cruising World, one in Enchanted Living, and another in Literary Traveler. Her first two poetry chapbooks, Levels of the Ocean and Her Sea-filled Arms: Layers of Blue are available for purchase. Three more chapbooks, Pacific Pieces, Pacific Prescription: Leukemia Cyclone, and Her Bloody Project are due to be released. She has four self-published chapbooks, an article published via E-book from being a featured speaker at a conference in Oxford, and poems that have been published in The Holland Sentinel, News from Hope College, The Mill from the University of Toledo, and on display at the Toledo Museum of Art, which included first place and finalist awards. At Grand Valley State University, she received 1st place in fiction and 2nd place in poetry for the Oldenburg Writing Contest. She has been a featured speaker at a literary conference in Boston and two Poetry Speaks at the University of Toledo. She is currently finishing a script, a novel, two more chapbooks, and a collection of short stories. With her teaching degree, she has taught Middle School Language Arts at Walker Charter Academy and Freshman Composition at the University of Toledo. Most recently, the Holland Sentinel featured her on the cover of their newspaper for sailing, and Hope College Alumni News is to release an article in June.Currently, she homeschools her four children and writes from her sailboat, which is a Westerly 49, named Selkie. Their family of six sails to circumnavigate the globe. So far, they have cruised, wintered, and been through lockdown in the following locations: the Great Lakes of Michigan, the Caribbean, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Azores, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, the circle of the Baltic Sea, the Bay of Biscay, Canary Isles, Cape Verde, back to the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Panama, French Polynesia, the Kingdom of Tonga, and New Zealand. These locations completed an Atlantic circumnavigation and a Pacific crossing. Her family plans to travel New Zealand by RV and finish a global circumnavigation by 2025.Magdalena enjoys cooking and dancing-most of the time together. With pen, spatula, and helm in hand, her sailing soul belongs on the sea where she chooses words, academics, ingredients, and destinations. Follow their story at www.sealongingselkie.net.

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