The Sea is My Ugly Twin by Marcella Remund

Seamlessly flowing between the glittering oceans of myth and dream and the fossilized, drought-threatened oceans of the high plains, Marcella Remund’s The Sea is My Ugly Twin conjures up brine-soaked lyrics of elemental transformation, salt, and blood. Part fairy tale, part magic spell, part Buddhist koan, part ecriture feminine, these deft and haunting poems silkily limn both the beautiful and grotesque with all of the glorious, shape-shifting, monstrous seduction of siren song.

–Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Dandarians, South Dakota Poet Laureate

Marcella Remund’s The Sea is my Ugly Twin is a dreamy collection of “liquid lullabies.” Playful and surreal, her poems summon our senses to a room that “smells like candles and squid ink,” basking us in the pleasures of coffee, seaweed, seal skin and beach grass. With wisdom both earth-bound and crab-like, these poems will bring wry smiles to your lips. Visit this watery world, shaped by fairytale and myth, today. It will lift you up even as it envelops you in its murky depths.

–Christine Stewart, author of Bluewords Greening and Untrussed

In The Sea Is My Ugly Twin, Marcella Remund invites us to disappear. Through images of otherworldly swells and prehistoric longings, we slide into the sustaining sea, into the Blue. Blue. Blue. Remund’s stunning, evocative lines call us back to where…we hobbled into the shade and made our animal noises. Such pleasure in this dream of return—even in our bodies of rusting machines heading West, one more time. A beautiful book.

–Jan Beatty, author of The Switching/Yard and Jackknife: New and Selected Poems