Overview

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.

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9780892556182

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Reviews

""""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 poets take nonhuman nature as just one more subject; for Bradfield, however, plants and animals—Atlantic seascapes, tropical forests, marine mammals, migratory seabirds—give most of her poems their reason to exist..."" -- Stephanie Burt - American Poet

Author Information

Writer/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Toward Antarctica, Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work, and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro.  She has co-edited the anthologies Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020  (with Alexandra Teague and Miller Oberman) and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology and Poetry (with CMarie Fuhrman and Derek Sheffield). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Sun, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Orion and have been widely anthologized. Winner of the Audre Lorde Prize from the Publishing Triangle, finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, her honors also include a Stegner Fellowship and a Bread Loaf Scholarship. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided, she lives on Cape Cod, teaches creative writing at Brandeis University, and balances her work as a writer with work as a naturalist/field assistant at home and afar.

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