brackish by nicole bethune winters

brackish reads like a literary photo album of minimalist snapshots that freeze the reader in time and nudge her into a meditative state. Sometimes it is an intimate glance at the quotidian rituals of family life; sometimes it is a contemporary landscape rendered with the light touch of a voice that feels as though it came from a more ancient civilization; but always the love of language is there, beckoning.

–Kathleen Balma, librarian at New Orleans Public Library and author of What the Traveler Knows

…In her debut collection brackish, Nicole Winters calls forward the natural world with fractured and compounding registers of exaltation. These poems, like the speaker whose “palms open to constellations,” seek a confluence of mysteries within and beyond the self. Through meditations on recurring lunar cycles, churning ocean currents, and the falling bodies of ospreys cast high above surging rivers, Winters skillfully channels a music that is, above all, celebratory and resounds with a powerful and insistent desire to listen as “the whole earth sings.”

–Jon Pineda, author of Little Anodynes

In Nicole Winters’ debut collection, brackish, we wade into a meditation of a life told through the sea. Each poem in this collection carries the myth, mystery, and beauty of the ocean, but also the personal—I’m anchored to/a piece of me buried/between sea & sand;/it pulls the moon. Place and persona weave together to create precise postcards rich with images and story that make you feel the sand on your fingertips, your skin salted/by rough waves. These are poems that were written to be dived into; Winters’ words are like sweet prayers reminding us, the sun buries us in light.

–Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press)