Biogeography [Perfect Paperback]

Sandra Meek (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2008

Scientists use the word ""biogeography"" for the geographical distribution of plant and animal life. Sandra Meek's Biogeography is a powerful metaphysical meditation on the connections between us humans and the larger natural world. Her elegant verse entwines public and private histories, unleashing them in fascinating habitats, ranging from a remote forest village accessible only by boat to the poet's own small backyard overrun with honeysuckle. Her lines travel these disparate landscapes, focusing on the wanton desecration of the land, while simultaneously seeking to inspire a new sense of wonder, a new registry of fresh and creative inspiration. In Meek's poems, the word and the world are inextricably linked. There is room for ""flamboyant faith"" and a new ""nomenclature of wonder.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In Chronographia the poet writes, the forest floor / littered with possibility, pine needles knit / like wishbones twinned arms. / Break one: lucks what remains / most whole. A cross section of these packed lines might resemble layers of sediment: the conflicting emotions of these revelations are stacked upon each other, not so that we read pleasure on one line and pain on the next, but pleasure and pain together. These moments of tension are so fragile, so based in that beautiful and subtle doubleness of words, that they risk invisibility. How easily we might miss the dark undercurrent and blame of the phrase littered with possibility, but Meek takes the risk. Eventually these tricks of language build to form a thunderous, collective power. The result is a book so deeply textured that it is nearly felt on the skin. Jazzy Danziger, from Meridian #23 (June, 2009)

""By the map of a turtles neck, the staircase of a voice, the music of a small dogs nails, Sandra Meek reads the world anew, reminding us of its endlessly dynamic and divine substance. The immersion of self, the selfhood of all living things, into the history of landscape is the creative act that Meek performs here, an act often accompanied by the hard cold fact of human atrocity. Listen: do you hear the teeth/approaching, do you trust the light, how it eats equally into/shadow and green? Have you noticed? The body without air goes blue/letting in the sky. (Courantijn River) That these poems assume metaphor rather than fret to develop it gives them a deeply evolved qualityMeek achieves in two lines what a poem of old might need thirty for, and she does so with an effortlessness that smacks of magic.""Larissa Szporluk --Review

About the Author

Biogeography is Sandra Meek's third collection of poetry and is the winner of the Dorset Prize. Meek was also a four-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded Editors' Choice for the 2002 James Wright Award, given by Mid-American Review, and she won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry and the Peace Corps Writers Award for Poetry in 2003. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, while many others and have been featured on the websites Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poetry Net's ""Poet of the Month."" Meek is an associate professor of English, rhetoric, and writing at Berry College, where she teaches creative writing and contemporary literature.

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 84 pages
• Publisher: Tupelo Press (November 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 193219570X
• ISBN-13: 978-1932195705
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,174,758 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Biographical Note

Sandra Meek's third book of poems, "Biogeography," was the 2006 winner of the Dorset Award (Tupelo Press, November 2008). Her previous book publications include "Nomadic Foundations" (2002) and "Burn" (2005), and she has also published a chapbook, "The Circumference of Arrival" (2001). She is also the editor of an anthology, "Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad" (Ninebark Press, 2007), which was awarded a 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. She has published more than one hundred poems in journals such as Agni, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Conjunctions, Green Mountains Review, and The Iowa Review, and she has twice been awarded Georgia Author of the Year, in 2006 for "Burn," and in 2003 for "Nomadic Foundations," which also was awarded the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry. Meek served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Manyana, Botswana, 1989-1991. In 2008, she was named Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, the flagship publication of The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, a journal which has a per-issue distribution of more than 100,000. She is a co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, Director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, and Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College. She lives in Rome, Georgia, USA.

"Biogeography" at Tupelo Press: https://www.tupelopress.org/biogeo.shtml