A-DRIFT by Amy-Sarah Marshall

Amy-Sarah Marshall’s debut collection, A-Drift, begins: “Of course, I was born in the ocean, at sea,” a poem that celebrates the grandeur, mythic tumult, and whole-body acceptance of the sea. From there on, I was caught in the poems’ musically enthralling cadences and slanting half-rhymes. These are poems as much of the body as the questing, doubting, hopeful mind of a speaker who can’t forget about the suffering of others or ignore the world’s beauty. A gorgeous and moving book!

–Jennifer Atkinson, author, The Drowned City

Thoughtful and thought provoking, Amy-Sarah Marshall debuts a well-crafted collection suffused with textures and trope. This sparkles on the surface, but don’t be fooled, there are deep waters here.

–Melanie Moro-Huber, author, Axe in Hand

Amy-Sarah Marshall’s poems remind us that we live in a body and are bound to gravity, that all we know (the mind itself is made of flesh) we know bodily—the miraculous and the ordinary. We know joy, ecstasy, and ease by way of the body, but also wretchedness, pain, violence, and effacement. The calm and elegant surface of the poems in A-DRIFT give way to complex, compelling, and fathomless depths.

–Eric Pankey, author, Augury