Afloat (The Birdy Poetry Prize)

Afloat (The Birdy Poetry Prize)

In Afloat, Catherine Anderson inspects the world around her with the detail of a scientist, the imagery of a painter, and the introspection of a philosopher. Through frequently "quotidian" scenarios-learning to knit, cutting rhubarb, purchasing flowers at the grocery store-Anderson ruminates on themes of love, spirituality, and justice, celebrating the beauty and wonder around us but not shying away from the loss and pain that so often accompany them. These poems saint all they touch-feather dancers, bell ringers, rubber pastries, tardigrades-revealing the holy in the everyday and the profound ties that connect us to each other, the natural world, and all that has come before. Winner of the 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize by Meadowlark Press. The punch of certain lines concusses long after you've closed Afloat- "From a darkness known only to her / into a light both of us could see"-the author explores the many facets, triumphs, illusions, delusions, highs and lows of being mother, daughter, sister, lover, teacher, creator, nurturer, icon, and rebel. In forceful narrative poems part memoir, lyric, ode, elegy, manifesto, a vibrant musicality, urgent in its revelations, carries from gasp to gasp. These are challenging and captivating cadences. Worth every round. -Jose Faus, The Life and Times of José Calderon The speaker in Afloat is at once the girl "irritated / by gravity, a lunar tug on my carved waist," her own mother reaching for Marlboros, and every woman with her "dark-petaled star." Dreamy, associative prose vignettes at the center of the book-an "almanac" of the pandemic-explore the deserted way we found ourselves then, rendered as "the shoe heel of Amelia Earhart . . . the eyetooth of Robinson Crusoe." Anderson's expansive and deeply ethical poems consider what needs mending, the wildernesses we have all crossed to get where we are, and how to navigate our animal selves, whose lot it is to both "swerve from dying" and to "meet the dog/ we all know." -Rebecca Hart Olander, Singing from the Deep End "How often I avoid the truth / even as it arrows my way," Anderson writes. "I resemble all women," she says and maps a life from girlhood to maturity-a woman holding a handful of stars ("Boylston Street Station"). With lyricism and generosity, Anderson concludes with a blessing, "Everyone you want to bless / could fill the planet-and so you begin . . . " -Cathryn Essinger, The Apricot and the Moon Afloat brings us moments of luminosity, as in "Heard on the Street," about a bellringer who climbs the spiral stairs to a small belfry to play of all things, "Love Me Tender" for those lucky listeners on the street below. There are any number of beautiful surprises in Afloat, like cutting rhubarb with leaves "larger this year than our two heads/put together," or buying roses and lilies at the grocery store during the pandemic. Anderson is able to turn almost everything we do into a ritual full of spiritual meaning: "Leaving port in the fog, /the captain chanted /the cloud-carved islands /we passed in the bay, each one /a breath-my mother gone, /my father gone-the captain's/ voice fading as we hit / the open sea." -Brian Daldorph, Kansas Poems Catherine Anderson has published four collections of poetry, including Everyone I Love Immortal (Woodley Press, 2019), Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press, 2014), The Work of Hands (Perugia Press, 2000), and In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books, 1983). In 2022, a memoir about her late brother who had nonspeaking autism, My Brother Speaks in Dreams: Of Family, Beauty & Belonging, was published by Wising Up Press. She has been recognized for her poetry by the Massachusetts Artists' Foundation, the Southern Humanities Review, the I-70 Review and the Crab Orchard Review. Over the years, her poems have also appeared in the Southern Review, the Harvard Review, and the Dunes Review, among many others. She lives in Kansas City, where she has worked for over twenty years assisting new immigrants and refugees to become skilled interpreters. Learn more about Catherine at www.catherineanderson.uno