The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World by Eva Skrande

“I start,” Eva Skrande writes, “where I always start: in the nave of the throat / where the hymns of fish decree that stars shall ride on their backs forever.” In The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World, the poet constructs a rich symbolic landscape populated by lilies and crows, moons and fish, yearning mothers and displaced daughters. What emerges from it all is a brilliant meditation on exile—exile as displacement, as state of mind and body, as metaphor and as fact—beautifully imagined and intricately interconnected. “I am made of countries / and bone,” Skrande concludes. “Made of wishes / of juniper and pine / of the promises told to the exiled.” This is a gorgeous book, one I will return to with pleasure.
–Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction: Poems

“I am made of countries/and bone,” Eva Skrande writes in this magical book of sorrow and mystery, blessing and lament. These surreal hymns sing with a sacred air!
–Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“Eva Skrande‘s poetry sails again through the universal realms of her spiritual ancestors –Gabriela Mistral, Esther Raab, Yehuda Amichai, Charles Simic — with her own flowing, sensuous and distinct music of psyche and language. Skrande’s work leaps with primal joy into humility, longing, ecstasy, and above all, profound gratitude for both the natural and the diverse cultural worlds she has inherited by birth. Now, in her third still miraculously ingenuous book the poet wings her visionary way through perilous journeys into the shared territories of Divine Love and human forgiveness.”

–Victoria Tester, author of Miracles of Sainted Earth

In her impressive third collection, Eva Skrande fashions an island out of memory. With elegant, sometimes Biblical language and bold strokes she unpacks a shared history of exile, opening wide the doors to a place where the past is both refuge and roadmap. Intimate and expressive, The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World becomes a manual for the disenfranchised and the hopeful, a graceful primer for “those with nowhere to dock their dreams.”
–Silvia Curbelo, author of Falling Landscape