Come celebrate the publication of Cape Cod poet Elizabeth Bradfield’s newest collection of poems: SOFAR, published this August by Persea Books.  A reading from the book will be followed by a reception.

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.

Bradfield’s work as a naturalist gives an earned intimacy and nuanced authority to her eco-grief, field observations, and metaphoric leaps as she regards whales, cusk eels, and storm petrels. These are the poems of a woman unafraid of navigating the depths and rip currents she moves through.

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.