Book Launch and Reading:
SOFAR: Poems by Elizabeth Bradfield
and Towards a Retreat by Samaa Abdurraqib
Thursday, August 28, 2025
5 PM
Come celebrate the launch of Truro-based poet Elizabeth Bradfield’s newest collection of poems: SOFAR, from Persea Books, and Maine-based poet Samaa Abdurraqib’s debut chapbook, Towards a Retreat, from Diode Editions. The two poets are friends and collaborators; they will read from their work, chat briefly, and happily sign books.
About SOFAR: Poems
In SOFAR, her fifth book of poems, poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield attends our current ecological and historic moment, her decades-long queer love, a lifetime on boats, and her body’s shifting currents with wry yearning and linguistic delight. These poems spring from her deep connection to the waters of the Outer Cape, where she has lived and worked since the late 1990s. Poems from SOFAR appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, and Orion.
Elizabeth Bradfield’s SOFAR is a sounding—both call and measurement. In this deeply felt collection, Bradfield charts a history of love, longing, and a life lived aboard boats and alongside whales, sharks, seals, birds, and even coyotes. These are poems of place, poems of the heart, and they ring with such tenderness, such longing, they raise in this reader an echoing ache.
—Donika Kelly, author of Bestiary and The Renunciations
“SOFAR” is an acronym for the “sound frequency and ranging channel,” a deep layer of oceanic water that enables sound to travel vast distances, and, drawing upon her deep knowledge and experience of the sea, Bradfield plumbs what can be heard by listening across the vast distances of our lives―within our memories and larger histories, between strangers and beloveds, and to the more-than-human world. These are the poems of a woman unafraid of navigating the depths and rip currents she moves through.
About Towards a Retreat
Samaa Abdurraqib’s Towards a Retreat seeks truth that is not polished but lived, that tries to make sense of the spaces we occupy and the histories we carry. This is a collection is both a meditation and a call to attention. The poems unfold like conversations with the land, ancestors, former selves, and the reader. They carry the weight of generational history and personal loss, yet they never collapse under that weight. Instead, they rise.
Abdurraqib writes about grief without sentimentality, love without simplification, and Blackness with nuance and care. She writes from the woods of Maine, from the remembered streets of the Midwest, from cabins that do not belong to her, and from the interior spaces of the self where identity, memory, and resistance take shape.
Samaa Abdurraqib’s Towards a Retreat refuses to hold back from what nature teaches us, from what music teaches us, from what spaces that don’t belong to us teaches us, from grief, and from white nonsense erasing Blackness. There’s more I can tell you about the large impact this small chapbook left on me, but you’re going to have to experience that for yourself. Sit a while for the retreat you need in Abdurraqib’s poetry. You haven’t seen rain, rage, or anything stunning like this before.
—Maya Williams, What’s So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway
Writer/Naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield’s (she/her) books are SOFAR (forthcoming in August), which includes poems that were published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Sun, and Orion; Toward Antarctica; Once Removed; Approaching Ice, which was a finalist from the James Laughlin award from the Academy of American Poets; Interpretive Work, which won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry; and the anthologies Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, winner of the 2024 Pacific Northwest Book Award and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration. Her poems have appeared in The Slowdown, The New Yorker, Poetry and her honors include a Stegner Fellowship and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant. Liz works as a naturalist and biology field assistant at home on Cape Cod, teaches creative writing at Brandeis University, and is Editor-in-Chief of Broadsided. www.ebradfield.com
Samaa Abdurraqib, PhD, lives, writes, and loves in Wabanaki Territory. She is the editor of From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Poets Write the Northeast (2023). Her poetry has appeared in Cider Press Review, Obsidian, Big Wing Review, and the collection Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic (2022). Samaa is a certified Maine Master Naturalist. She is always listening for birdsong.
Event Accessibility Information
The Fine Arts Work Center is committed to making its events and services inclusive and accessible for everyone. If you need any accommodations to fully participate, please contact our Accessibility Coordinator, Susan Blood, at 508-487-9960, extension 106.
Both the Stanley Kunitz Common Room and the Hudson D. Walker Gallery meet ADA accessibility standards. If you need help accessing these spaces, please call us at 508-487-9960 ext. 101 before your visit.
With the exception of service animals, pets are not allowed in the Fine Arts Work Center’s indoor public spaces. While we recognize the important role pets play in our lives, our priority is maintaining a safe and inclusive environment for all participants and approved animals. These policies are based on feedback from staff and the community. For more details, please visit our Service and Emotional Support Animal Policy.
Thank You to our Sponsors
This program is supported in part by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, Mass Cultural Council, Mass Development, and the Provincetown Tourism Fund.
