An Ecology of Elsewhere (Poems)

By Sandra Meek. Persea Books: New York, NY, 2016.

Following her mother’s death, nearly twenty years after her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Sandra Meek, a writer of “dazzling, intimate poems” (Library Journal) began traveling frequently through southern Africa. During this same period, she and her sister traveled the American Southwest with their declining father, confronting and healing from a difficult family history before his death. Whether describing a Namibian baby seal hunt, 1500-year-old Welwitschia plants living off of fog in a desert studded with landmines, or the sandstone “temples” of Zion National Park, Meek’s poems in An Ecology of Elsewhere attend to the endangered as well as the enduring, braiding personal narrative with those of the natural world from which they arise.

An Ecology of Elsewhere was named a Spring 2016 Poetry Top Pick and Top Spring Poetry Don’t Miss Title by Library Journal.

Sandra Meek is the author of four books of poems, including Road Scatter, and the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, as well as cofounder of Ninebark Press, Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College. She lives in Rome, Georgia.