Still
Persea Books, distributed by WW Norton. January 2020.
Named a "New & Noteworthy Poetry Book"
by The New York Times Book Review
Named a Top Spring Poetry Title by Library Journal
The New York Times, Feb. 4, 2020:
STILL: Poems, by Sandra Meek. (Persea, paper, $15.95.) Meek’s prescient poetry has long dwelled darkly on humanity’s environmental impact; in this book, her sixth, the tone has grown urgent, even apocalyptic. “May your choked fields sing / only hunger’s growl,” the donkey narrator of one poem intones.
Library Journal, March 2020:
Meek, Sandra. Still. Persea. Jan. 2020. 96p. ISBN 9780892555055. pap. $15.95. POETRY
If you had cabinets juxtaposing human artifacts and natural wonders, as they often did in the Renaissance, what would they look like? "O cabinet/ of wonders: these// are not those," warns Meek ( The Ecology of Elsewhere) of the "cabinets" in her latest collection, which is equal parts thought-provoking, language-drunk, and innately challenging. Divided into four cabinets, each containing a half-dozen "Still Lifes" ("with White," "with Caribbean Reef Squid"), the poems defy easy logic, leaping from line to line and image to image. In one, for instance, a phantom crane fly ("stilled wings/ the veined gauze of obsolescence") leads to disappearing images in a fitting-room mirror ("you let her go rather/ I made her gone"). It’s worth it to take the time to see how dust settling from a shattered statue of Stalin relates to the forward propulsion of music, life never being static. VERDICT Absorbing reading for poetry pros.
Persea Books, distributed by WW Norton. January 2020.
Named a "New & Noteworthy Poetry Book"
by The New York Times Book Review
Named a Top Spring Poetry Title by Library Journal
The New York Times, Feb. 4, 2020:
STILL: Poems, by Sandra Meek. (Persea, paper, $15.95.) Meek’s prescient poetry has long dwelled darkly on humanity’s environmental impact; in this book, her sixth, the tone has grown urgent, even apocalyptic. “May your choked fields sing / only hunger’s growl,” the donkey narrator of one poem intones.
Library Journal, March 2020:
Meek, Sandra. Still. Persea. Jan. 2020. 96p. ISBN 9780892555055. pap. $15.95. POETRY
If you had cabinets juxtaposing human artifacts and natural wonders, as they often did in the Renaissance, what would they look like? "O cabinet/ of wonders: these// are not those," warns Meek ( The Ecology of Elsewhere) of the "cabinets" in her latest collection, which is equal parts thought-provoking, language-drunk, and innately challenging. Divided into four cabinets, each containing a half-dozen "Still Lifes" ("with White," "with Caribbean Reef Squid"), the poems defy easy logic, leaping from line to line and image to image. In one, for instance, a phantom crane fly ("stilled wings/ the veined gauze of obsolescence") leads to disappearing images in a fitting-room mirror ("you let her go rather/ I made her gone"). It’s worth it to take the time to see how dust settling from a shattered statue of Stalin relates to the forward propulsion of music, life never being static. VERDICT Absorbing reading for poetry pros.
An Ecology of Elsewhere
Persea Books, distributed by WW Norton. May 2016.
Named a Spring 2016 Poetry Top Pick
and Top Spring Poetry Don't-Miss Title by Library Journal
Winner, 2017 Georgia Author of the Year, Poetry
Winner, 2017 Peace Corps Writers Award, Poetry
Starred Review: Library Journal, April 2016
*Meek, Sandra. An Ecology of Elsewhere. Persea. May 2016. 120p. ISBN 9780892554737. pap. $16.95. POETRY
Recipient of the 2015 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, Meek (Road Scatter) weaves travels through Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa to honor her recently deceased mother with trips she took in this country with her sister and ailing father, recalling a sometimes fractured family. What’s remarkable is that Meek does not stoop to the journey-as-healing narrative one might expect. Instead, she puts us in panoramic settings that in their bristly, sun-seared particulars represent her brittle emotions; she doesn’t take herself (or us) comfortingly out of the world but shows us baby seal hunts and the noble Welwitschia mirabilis, surviving in the brutally arid Namib desert, surrounded by landmines left after Angola’s bid for independence and memories of Germans slaughtering the Herero and Nama people in the early 1900s. “What’s lost// most remains” she says of dry grass-thorn—and of so much else. VERDICT Meek’s lines are dense and challenging but worth every effort.
Read "Pattern and Design: On Aracelis Girmay's The Black Maria and Sandra Meek's An Ecology of Elsewhere," by Robin Becker in The Georgia Review
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 attend to the endangered as well as the enduring, braiding personal narratives with those of the natural world from which they arise. At once nomadic and deeply rooted to place, An Ecology of Elsewhere interweaves a difficult past, personal and terrestrial, with an uncertain future.
"These lush and sensory poems take the reader many places, both exterior and interior, from The Skeleton Coast of Namibia and across savannahs of linguistic imagination. This is a deeply textured, brilliant book."
--Thomas Lux
"With incendiary eloquence, Sandra Meek creates a cosmos of “ologies”— biology, cosmology, etymology, entomology, philology, ecology. With an intelligence as intimate, universal, ferocious, and phenomenal as the fires (literal and figurative) that course through these poems, she travels fluently, apostrophically, and provocatively among the “words of this world” and the worlds of the word, attending the “-logos” that brings all “elsewhere” here and that grounds each and every one of her teeming, prodigious forays into gnosis."
--Lisa Russ Spaar
Buy An Ecology of Elsewhere from Persea Books, Amazon, IndieBound, and Barnes & Noble
More about An Ecology of Elsewhere and Persea Books
Reviews of An Ecology of Elsewhere
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 attend to the endangered as well as the enduring, braiding personal narratives with those of the natural world from which they arise. At once nomadic and deeply rooted to place, An Ecology of Elsewhere interweaves a difficult past, personal and terrestrial, with an uncertain future.
"These lush and sensory poems take the reader many places, both exterior and interior, from The Skeleton Coast of Namibia and across savannahs of linguistic imagination. This is a deeply textured, brilliant book."
--Thomas Lux
"With incendiary eloquence, Sandra Meek creates a cosmos of “ologies”— biology, cosmology, etymology, entomology, philology, ecology. With an intelligence as intimate, universal, ferocious, and phenomenal as the fires (literal and figurative) that course through these poems, she travels fluently, apostrophically, and provocatively among the “words of this world” and the worlds of the word, attending the “-logos” that brings all “elsewhere” here and that grounds each and every one of her teeming, prodigious forays into gnosis."
--Lisa Russ Spaar
Buy An Ecology of Elsewhere from Persea Books, Amazon, IndieBound, and Barnes & Noble
More about An Ecology of Elsewhere and Persea Books
Reviews of An Ecology of Elsewhere
Road Scatter
Persea Books, distributed by WW Norton. 2012.
From Library Journal:
"In her fourth collection, Meek presents dazzling, intricate poems about both the personal and the political . . . ."
Read the complete Library Journal review and other reviews of Road Scatter:
Sandra Meek’s breathtaking new collection exhibits the extraordinary scope and power of her work. Whether these meditations consider the ravages of illness—or those of the natural world—she holds us close to the intimacy of loss. Yet these poems remain fearless in their belief in human reckoning, and the orchestrations of these lines match the power of the poet’s mind at work. Elegant and elegiac, the poems of Road Scatter gather into a book of the body, a book whose ending we know awaits each of us not far up the road, in the distance quietly closing in ahead.
—David St. John
Sandra Meek’s poems are both deeply surprising and deeply felt. Precise and faceted, any line, it feels, conveys some new constellation of image, knowledge and feeling. Road Scatter is a book of mourning, but also a book of living: rising from grief, these are pages returning light in all
directions.
—Jane Hirshfield
What here begins in personal elegy develops by faithful observation and keen articulation a pastoral, a cosmic reach, implicating the earth and all its fragile phenomena in melancholy procession. That ancient trope recovers an astonishing, credible currency in these lines where Sandra Meek attends all that is “ghosting in [her] hands.”
—Scott Cairns
Buy Road Scatter from Persea Books, Amazon, IndieBound, and Barnes & Noble
More about Road Scatter and Persea Books:
—David St. John
Sandra Meek’s poems are both deeply surprising and deeply felt. Precise and faceted, any line, it feels, conveys some new constellation of image, knowledge and feeling. Road Scatter is a book of mourning, but also a book of living: rising from grief, these are pages returning light in all
directions.
—Jane Hirshfield
What here begins in personal elegy develops by faithful observation and keen articulation a pastoral, a cosmic reach, implicating the earth and all its fragile phenomena in melancholy procession. That ancient trope recovers an astonishing, credible currency in these lines where Sandra Meek attends all that is “ghosting in [her] hands.”
—Scott Cairns
Buy Road Scatter from Persea Books, Amazon, IndieBound, and Barnes & Noble
More about Road Scatter and Persea Books:
"Sandra Meek's Biogeography is written with urgency and verve in every line. 'I know my body will become/its own fist of blown glass, you the sweep/of light my camera first//caught of the stars,' she writes, and we are haunted by the snaking turns of past and present, the 'blindness always there//at the heart of flowering.'"
--Arthur Sze
"By the map of a turtle's neck, the staircase of a voice, the music of a small dog's nails, Sandra Meek reads the world anew, reminding us of its endlessly dynamic and divine substance. The immersion of the self, the selfhood of all living things, into the history of the landscape is the creative act that Meek performs here, an act often accompanied by the hard cold fact of human atrocity . . . . That these poems assume metaphor rather than fret to develop it gives them a deeply evolved quality--Meek 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
"Biogeography speaks to the transience of things we hope will always be
with us, including ourselves. Meek touches the awful disappearance of life and its vital howling against absence. This is a remarkably tender and beautifully wise book, without blame, without sentimentalism."
--Afaa Michael Weaver
Tupelo Press, 2008
--Arthur Sze
"By the map of a turtle's neck, the staircase of a voice, the music of a small dog's nails, Sandra Meek reads the world anew, reminding us of its endlessly dynamic and divine substance. The immersion of the self, the selfhood of all living things, into the history of the landscape is the creative act that Meek performs here, an act often accompanied by the hard cold fact of human atrocity . . . . That these poems assume metaphor rather than fret to develop it gives them a deeply evolved quality--Meek 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
"Biogeography speaks to the transience of things we hope will always be
with us, including ourselves. Meek touches the awful disappearance of life and its vital howling against absence. This is a remarkably tender and beautifully wise book, without blame, without sentimentalism."
--Afaa Michael Weaver
Tupelo Press, 2008
Buy Biogeography from the publisher (Tupelo Press)
Buy Biogeography from Amazon
Reviews of Biogeography
Buy Biogeography from Amazon
Reviews of Biogeography
Edited and with an introduction by Sandra Meek, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad brings together the work of thirty-four contemporary American poets whose art and whose lives have been significantly enriched by distant journeys. Covering landscapes ranging widely, from Antarctica to Zagreb, from Italy to India to Iraq, these intelligent and intensely felt poems generously weave the reader into the lush diversity of word and world.
Contributors: Susan J. Allspaw; Francisco Aragón, John Balaban, Tina Barr, Derick Burleson, Alfred Corn, Mary Crow, Rita Dove, Gary Gildner, Marilyn Hacker, Rachel Hadas, Barbara Hamby, Garrett Hongo, John Isles, George Kalamaras, Marilyn Krysl, Adrie Kusserow, Laurence Lieberman, Anne Marie Macari, Malinda Markham, Susan Rich, Nicholas Samaras, R.T. Smith, Sue Standing, Terese Svoboda, Karen Swenson, Arthur Sze, Margaret Szumowski, Diane Thiel, Bill Tremblay, Brian Turner, Sidney Wade, Afaa Michael Weaver, Charles Wright
Each poet is represented by three poems and a prose piece by the poet about the significance of international travel in his or her work and life.
Ninebark Press, 2007
Contributors: Susan J. Allspaw; Francisco Aragón, John Balaban, Tina Barr, Derick Burleson, Alfred Corn, Mary Crow, Rita Dove, Gary Gildner, Marilyn Hacker, Rachel Hadas, Barbara Hamby, Garrett Hongo, John Isles, George Kalamaras, Marilyn Krysl, Adrie Kusserow, Laurence Lieberman, Anne Marie Macari, Malinda Markham, Susan Rich, Nicholas Samaras, R.T. Smith, Sue Standing, Terese Svoboda, Karen Swenson, Arthur Sze, Margaret Szumowski, Diane Thiel, Bill Tremblay, Brian Turner, Sidney Wade, Afaa Michael Weaver, Charles Wright
Each poet is represented by three poems and a prose piece by the poet about the significance of international travel in his or her work and life.
Ninebark Press, 2007
Buy Deep Travel from Amazon
For course adoptions, or to buy Deep Travel from the publisher (Ninebark Press), email Ninebark at ninebarkpress@yahoo.com
For course adoptions, or to buy Deep Travel from the publisher (Ninebark Press), email Ninebark at ninebarkpress@yahoo.com
"Sandra Meek's Burn is crafted with stealthily reflective care in an effort to restrain the hysteria towards which the new century seems to hurtle with 'democracy in entropy' as the ' . . . bisected self goes on . . . trampling rusted machetes in the grass.' The cosmos thus far endures, our best, our only reassurance. Whether or not we can get ourselves back to the garden, we are all stardust, and we might want to foget, once and forever, about building that fallout shelter."
--C.D. Wright
"These poems are, in a broad sense, poems of homage. There's a kind of playful dialectic evident here, a mind trying to embrace everything that draws it in and being changed in the process, a synthesis of observer and observed. The reason of the poems, an almost scientific desire to be specific, to get it right, ultimately turns to metaphor, to the need to make categorical and logical jumps in the pursuit of understanding. Light runs throughout this book--the light of stars, the light of the mind . . . . While redemption is not the intention of these poems, it is suggested by the confidence and beauty with which they proceed. What becomes clear reading the work of Sandra Meek is that intelligence, deftly applied, is love."
--Bob Hicok
--C.D. Wright
"These poems are, in a broad sense, poems of homage. There's a kind of playful dialectic evident here, a mind trying to embrace everything that draws it in and being changed in the process, a synthesis of observer and observed. The reason of the poems, an almost scientific desire to be specific, to get it right, ultimately turns to metaphor, to the need to make categorical and logical jumps in the pursuit of understanding. Light runs throughout this book--the light of stars, the light of the mind . . . . While redemption is not the intention of these poems, it is suggested by the confidence and beauty with which they proceed. What becomes clear reading the work of Sandra Meek is that intelligence, deftly applied, is love."
--Bob Hicok
2005
Buy Burn on Amazon
Reviews of Burn
"The landscape of Botswana, and its otherness to human understanding, is palpable in these poems . . . . The book explores and enacts (not least in its estrangements of language) the otherness of the physical and social worlds, and the ways in which they other the speaker. She neither romanticizes nor patronizes those conventionally defined 'others' who are her students, her colleagues, her friends, but instead recognizes and explores the ways in which she herself is other, not just to those around her, but to herself. Crossing borders of place and self, 'erasing/the margin of regret,' while redrawing it, Sandra Meek tells us 'The history//of the darkness of light,' making the vanishing visible."
--Reginald Shepherd
"Sandra Meek's book is dedicated to the secondary school students she taught in Botswana in 1990-1. It explores both sides of the Great Divide between the native culture and the one superficially imposed on it by the developed world . . . . Meek is even-handed. She neither judges nor praises, but the reader comes away from these often stunning poems with a broken heart."
--Maxine Kumin
--Reginald Shepherd
"Sandra Meek's book is dedicated to the secondary school students she taught in Botswana in 1990-1. It explores both sides of the Great Divide between the native culture and the one superficially imposed on it by the developed world . . . . Meek is even-handed. She neither judges nor praises, but the reader comes away from these often stunning poems with a broken heart."
--Maxine Kumin
2002
More about Nomadic Foundations and photographic notes
Buy Nomadic Foundations on Amazon
Reviews of Nomadic Foundations
"With her passionate syntax, Sandra Meek excavates experience while at the same time clinging lovingly to its surface contours. The Circumference of Arrival is a perfect description of her fascinating, and paradoxical art."
--Mark Jarman
"This is a brilliant book by a brilliant young poet, and yet what shines forth is as often the simple terrifying evidence of history as it is (and it is) the complicated consolations of her art. No poetry being published today is more intelligently aware of time and place and mortality, and yet able to attain moments of grace and elegance. Sandra Meek has done that necessary, difficult thing of which poetry is capable: she has taken the world in all its horror into her confidence, and yet she still rejoices in the beautiful and the tender. When she considers the grave of Cecil Rhodes, she admits that yes, the sky has fallen . . . 'to blue splinters; spilled like tongues / lizards swarm Rhodes' grave, / knocking the brass door / to his body, the space left behind.'"
--Bin Ramke
--Mark Jarman
"This is a brilliant book by a brilliant young poet, and yet what shines forth is as often the simple terrifying evidence of history as it is (and it is) the complicated consolations of her art. No poetry being published today is more intelligently aware of time and place and mortality, and yet able to attain moments of grace and elegance. Sandra Meek has done that necessary, difficult thing of which poetry is capable: she has taken the world in all its horror into her confidence, and yet she still rejoices in the beautiful and the tender. When she considers the grave of Cecil Rhodes, she admits that yes, the sky has fallen . . . 'to blue splinters; spilled like tongues / lizards swarm Rhodes' grave, / knocking the brass door / to his body, the space left behind.'"
--Bin Ramke
A limited edition chapbook (2001)
Out of print
Reviews of The Circumference of Arrival and a poetic response
Out of print
Reviews of The Circumference of Arrival and a poetic response