“Beasley uses humor and surprise like a scythe, cutting to the root of a matter.”—Washington Post
In Count the Waves, Sandra Beasley turns her eclectic imagination to the heart’s pursuits. A man and a woman sit at the same dinner table, an ocean of worry separating them. An iceberg sets out to dance. A sword swallower ponders his dating prospects. ‘The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts, ‘ the poet observes in ‘Ukulele.’ ‘No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. / No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage.’
Beasley’s voice is pithy and playful, with a ferocious intelligence that invites comparison to both Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker. In one of six signature sestinas, she warns, ‘You must not use a house to build a home, / and never look for poetry in poems.’ The collection’s centerpiece is a haunting sequence that engages The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, an 1853 compendium of phrases for use by mail, telegraph, or the enigmatic “Instantaneous Letter Writer.’
Assembled over ten years and thousands of miles, these poems illuminate how intimacy is lost and gained during our travels. Decisive, funny, and as compassionate as she is merciless, Beasley is a reckoning force on the page.
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Sandra Beasley is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of Arts and the author of three previous poetry collections, including the Barnard Women Poets Prize–winning I Was the Jukebox. She lives in Washington, DC.
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