books :: anthologies

Books

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Approaching Ice
(Persea Books, 2010)
Finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets

This collection portrays the gripping history of polar exploration by channeling its most notable figures—Symmes, Mawson, Scott, Cherry-Garrard, Byrd, and Shackleton among them. From their perspectives and her own, Elizabeth Bradfield relays the wonders and dangers, physical and mental, encountered while endeavoring to reach the earth's least-hospitable regions.

"Meticulously researched, but never stunted by research, these poems eschew easy drama to look instead at the complex desires that drive us into the earth's frozen regions—and at the haunting outcomes of those desires. In her vivid, unsentimental poetry, Bradfield is both chronicler and active lover, braiding across the pages the gloss-ice strands of history, landscape, and personal longing."
—Linda Bierds

"Approaching Ice chilled me and warmed me. It got me up walking around and thinking a million things, and threw me back down to read more. It's a high latitude book, a storm, a soundless daybreak at the end of the world, an exquisite investigation into why we explore. I loved it."
—Kim Heacox, author of Shackleton: The Antarctic Challenge

        (read poems from Approaching Ice)

Amazon link

Interpretive Work
(Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008)
Winner of the Audre Lorde Award and finalist for a Lambda Literary Award

Natural history, work, queerness, and family collide in Interpretive Work. When they do, a deep stubborn will emerges, a belief in the unexpected beauty of the world—flaws and all. The poems of this collection foreground the role of the viewer—the interpreter "smudging self across what's seen."

From neighborhood kids cussing in the cul-de-sac to marbled murrelets calling in Southeast Alaska, the poems of this book reach toward a moment where one finds "this unsettlement, / this beauty applauded at last."

Interpretive Work in Reviews:

• "Bradfield's poems guide us alertly into this treacherous territory pocked with political pitfalls and theoretical quagmires. One hardly notices the perils that abound because Bradfield is such a deft naturalist, with a keen eye"
  — Jon Christensen, The San Francisco Chronicle
• "The use of such words as 'natural,' 'vulnerability,' and the outcry at the imposition of a dominant group over the well-being of another suddenly take on a more complicated resonance."
  — Rigoberto Gonzalez, Harriet (the Poetry Foundation's blog)
• "In her marvelous debut collection, Elizabeth Bradfield probes the work of daily life, locating her speakers in family, intimate relationship, neighborhood, wilderness, and workplace. ... an important new voice among us."
  — Robin Becker, The Women's Reivew of Books

        (read poems from Interpretive Work)        (more reviews)

Anthologies

Liz's work is in the anthologies Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry (Autumn House Press, 2007), Best New Poets 2006 (Meridian Press), and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel (2006). Find them all at Amazon.com.