Everywhere Is North by Anne Hampford

Everywhere Is North is a journey of transcendence. Childhood, icebergs, solitude, and the Earth’s shifting landscape are a few of the reader’s companions, the poet commanding our hearts along the way. Here are layers of feathers and skin, the charged spaces between Self and Other, age and youth, life and death, rendered in their beauty and complexity by a voice uniquely feminine.  Rich in sound and shot through with spiritual longing, Everywhere Is North turns the reader inside-out and leaves them enlightened, ready for whatever mystery is next.

–Caroline Goodwin, author of Peregrine (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and The Paper Tree (Big Yes Press, 2019)

These gorgeous, hard-won poems by Anne Hampford are portraits of both a continent and a self that refuse to be owned by anyone. Ambivalent about romantic love and partnership, she memorably meditates on home and rootedness in a most inhospitable place. It’s as if the whiteness of the ice and the blues of the ocean are perfect blank screens onto which desires and fears are projected. I feel Hampford’s direct experience of the unconditional—and her very human, mammalian, creaturely needs—fueling all of these poems. She is both body and spirit. Ice and channel. Mortal and flowing.

–Greg Wrenn, author of Brittingham Prize-winning Centaur

Wise and wide-eyed, Hampford takes us on a journey to the ice continent of Antarctica, a shape-shifting voyage through memory, loss, and the variable self. Through these poems, we become participants in nature’s grand drama, acted upon and transformed: “the bergy-bit breaks away, pauses as if deciding what to do, then flips, revealing its ancient underside, the color of a Morpho butterfly.” This collection brings us to a breathtaking place where we lose our bearings and gain insight. How do we navigate this life packed with loss? By celebrating the sublime: “Every leap/a joyous dispatch of barnacles and/here I am.”

–Kendra Tanacea, author of A Filament Burns in Blue Degrees