In Count the Waves, Sandra Beasley turns her eclectic imagination to the heart's pursuits. A man and a woman sit at the same dinner table, an ocean of worry separating them. An iceberg sets out to dance. A sword swallower ponders his dating prospects. "The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts," the poet observes in "Ukulele." "No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. / No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage."

Beasley's voice is pithy and playful, with a ferocious intelligence that invites comparison to both Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker. In one of six signature sestinas, she warns, "You must not use a house to build a home, / and never look for poetry in poems." The collection's centerpiece is a haunting sequence that engages The Traveler's Vade Mecum, an 1853 compendium of phrases for use by mail, telegraph, or the enigmatic "Instantaneous Letter Writer."

Assembled over ten years and thousands of miles, these poems illuminate how intimacy is lost and gained during our travels. Decisive, funny, and as compassionate as she is merciless, Beasley is a reckoning force on the page.

About the Author
Sandra Beasley is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of Arts and the author of three previous poetry collections, including the Barnard Women Poets Prize-winning I Was the Jukebox. She lives in Washington, DC.

Reviews
"Sandra Beasley is a master poet of facts, story, feeling, and the slipknot statement that binds them together. Inventive, ingeniously fitted, musical, precise, unfettered, her poems etch and mirror the clarities and strangeness of our human lives. This irresistibly visionary book resembles to no small degree a cabinet of wonders. To every phenomenon and circumstance of the heart, its poems open, saying, Yes, this too I know; this too we are. Then add, Now, let us see further." -- Jane Hirshfield, author of Come, Thief
"Her lightness works best when it dapples her darkness-and when her darkness, as it often does, feels truly deep." -- Poetry



Book Information
ISBN 9780393243208
Author Sandra Beasley
Format Hardback
Page Count 96
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 236g
Dimensions(mm) 218mm * 147mm * 15mm