Naiad Blood by Sarah C. Beckmann

Sarah Beckmann’s Naiad Blood is a first collection of vibrant formal intelligence at once various in its embodiments and dexterous at every turn. With near mythic urgency, these poems evoke the pulse and discipline—the adrenaline-fueled duende—of the rower’s life on water. In the end, the boat to which she gives voice in one memorable poem, “Rigging,” races beyond observance and precision into the deeper currents of metaphor—“like waves, these words—they break on the bow.”

–Daniel Tobin, Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College

What better life than a life spent in boats, and what better subject to write about? Naiad Blood is an ode to this calling, the coming-of-age inquiry of a young woman discovering herself in a sport that she loves.

–Daniel J. Boyne, author of The Red Rose Crew: A True Story of Women, Winning, and the Water