Riding Horses in the Harbor by Beth Oast Williams

 

In Riding Horses in the Harbor, Beth Williams takes us to the blurry edge where land meets water and asks us to consider the source of our own rivers, the inlets of our waiting, what things flood over us like love. In the garden, there are vines and tomatoes; rain, a world that “reads like a newfound poem.” Is land or the river mother’s body, lost but eternally present? Sometimes, the river is meringue; sometimes it is a bottomless vessel which carries the bodies of those that “never made it to land.” No matter; from the very first moment we’re thrown in, unsuspecting, the poet instructs us to move with the current: “you are your own/ canoe, carved out/ and hollow.” And we trust her when she places these wise poems in our hands as a “way to get home.”

–Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (fall 2020) and The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (2018)

 

In that space where sky meets sea and land again is a sliver of light-a window that opens to an opposite shore, an open curtain to the past. In Williams’ debut collection, she captures that retreating space of a land overrun with rising waters and changing tides awash in memory and promise, family and desire. “The Bay is what happens when you give/in” and these poems give it all in their watery wonder, in the salt spray, in the hope of a raft made of her words.

–Kindra McDonald, author of In the Meat Years(Kelsay Books) and Fossils (FLP)

 

https://the-muse.org/event/beth-oast-williams-book-launch-reading/

 

 

View a recording of my book launch from Saturday, January 9th:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLLGzMEagYs&feature=youtu.be