At Sea by Rebekah Bloyd

Ship out on the rafts of these intricately woven poems into waters at once buoyant and “increasingly familiar,” even as they spirit you away again and again into darkening depths where your sailing skills better not fail you, else you’ll be so disoriented you won’t find your way back to port. Wobbly, having just tied up again, I can’t wait to come by “una botella de Johnny Walker, / una Aspirina Bayer”; relieved but ever grateful, for “blue circles” which “illuminate near me,” still, my “lungs filled with sea air.” These poems will bring you back more alive than you’ve been in some time.

–Stuart Friebert, author of Decanting: Selected & New Poems (Lost Horse Press)

Skycloud at sea, silverquilted depths, blue bound — the sea is omnipresent in Rebekah Bloyd’s evocative poems, which remind us how to feel both tenderness and grief. Her Caribbean landscapes are ripe with parrotfish and yellow birds and bright blue balconies, but also with traffic, graffiti, corruption, and a lost husband. Bloyd’s lines, spun with occasional Spanish phrases, sing with a lyrical grace.

–Claudia Monpere, author of “Car, Kitchen, Canyon: Mother Writing,”
in Herspace: Women Writing in Solitude (The Haworth Press)