The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World by Eva Skrande
$22.99
“I start,” Eva Skrande writes, “where I always start: in the nave of the throat / where the hymns of fish decree that stars shall ride on their backs forever.” In The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World, the poet constructs a rich symbolic landscape populated by lilies and crows, moons and fish, yearning mothers and displaced daughters. What emerges from it all is a brilliant meditation on exile—exile as displacement, as state of mind and body, as metaphor and as fact—beautifully imagined and intricately interconnected. “I am made of countries / and bone,” Skrande concludes. “Made of wishes / of juniper and pine / of the promises told to the exiled.” This is a gorgeous book, one I will return to with pleasure.
–Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction: Poems
“I am made of countries/and bone,” Eva Skrande writes in this magical book of sorrow and mystery, blessing and lament. These surreal hymns sing with a sacred air!
–Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry
“Eva Skrande‘s poetry sails again through the universal realms of her spiritual ancestors –Gabriela Mistral, Esther Raab, Yehuda Amichai, Charles Simic — with her own flowing, sensuous and distinct music of psyche and language. Skrande’s work leaps with primal joy into humility, longing, ecstasy, and above all, profound gratitude for both the natural and the diverse cultural worlds she has inherited by birth. Now, in her third still miraculously ingenuous book the poet wings her visionary way through perilous journeys into the shared territories of Divine Love and human forgiveness.”
–Victoria Tester, author of Miracles of Sainted Earth
In her impressive third collection, Eva Skrande fashions an island out of memory. With elegant, sometimes Biblical language and bold strokes she unpacks a shared history of exile, opening wide the doors to a place where the past is both refuge and roadmap. Intimate and expressive, The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World becomes a manual for the disenfranchised and the hopeful, a graceful primer for “those with nowhere to dock their dreams.”
–Silvia Curbelo, author of Falling Landscape
Description
The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World
by Eva Skrande
Full-length, Paper
List: $22.99
979-8-88838-614-9
2024
The poems in The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World address exile both literally and metaphorically. The book addresses the literal exile of the poems’ main speaker as well as the hard migrations of refugees. It discusses how exile might “swallow [one] whole” and the pain of refugees, whom the speaker imagines long to see their homeland once more. Metaphorically, it looks at life as a journey of and to exile. The book explores, for example, the journey from childhood through older ages and suggests that death is the ultimate exile as we leave the country of the body. These poems are incantations that challenge, refuse, and accept loss and longing.
Eva Skrande is the author of three volumes of poems, including My Mother’s Cuba and Bone Argot along with the chapbook, The Gates of the Somnambulist. Her poems have appeared in Agni, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace the American Poetry Review, and other journals. She has received fellowships from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, the Inprint Foundation, and the Houston Arts Council. She teaches for Writers in the Schools in Houston. She is a faculty tutor at Houston Community College and is a writing coach and founder of Write for Success Tutoring.
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