Ambergris (Paperback)

Amy Dryansky (she/her) has published two previous poetry collections. Her first, How I Got Lost So Close to Home, won the New England / New York Award from Alice James Books. The second, Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry) received the Massachusetts Book Award. Individual poems appear in Adroit Journal, Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, MER, New England Review, Orion, Radar, The Sun, Tin House, Waxwing and other journals, as well as several anthologies. She’s a former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and two artist fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She parents two
children, works as a grant writer and occasionally teaches creative writing, most recently as the James Merrill Visiting Poet at Amherst College.

In Ambergris, Amy Dryansky explores illness, family, motherhood, and the natural world
with a voice both searching and unsentimental. These poems move between the intimate
and the elemental—fields and rivers, hospital rooms, kitchens, and memory—asking how
we live with uncertainty, grief, and desire. Dryansky finds meaning in the strange
alchemy of experience, where irritation, loss, and bewilderment are transformed into
language and insight. Attentive to the fragile beauty of ordinary moments, the poems
remind us that transformation often begins in what resists understanding: “What can’t be
digested made / precious—like ambergris.” This is a collection that faces the world’s
difficulty without surrendering its wonder.
—January Gill O’Neill, author of Glitter Road

Amy Dryansky’s newest book is a garden, fraught and tangled with all the right flora:
asters and witch hazel, broken corn stalks and pizza boxes and bird bones—these poems
unearth so many new strains of loss, grief, and the beautiful estrangement that comes
with living. Ambergris is a collection that tempers anger with tenderness, danger with
wit, as it looks to discover hope and beauty in unlikely places. What a surprising,
gorgeous book.
—W. Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings

What happens when the ground of what we’ve believed shifts, when we “can’t invent a
different ending?” In her exceptional collection, Ambergris, Amy Dryansky lives these
questions as she grapples with her husband’s fatal diagnosis, weighs lessons in failure
and desire, and carries herself through a world that’s become inhospitable. Writing
incisively into grief laid bare, (“help is not on the way”), she sings the lost notes of the
body, seeking to make something from what’s disappearing. To do so requires a lyric that
looks beneath the looking, a rare kind of honesty and precision that lives beyond the
threshold of loss. And, reader, she’s done it. Ambergris is a brilliantly crafted work of
heartache and wit and frankness and complicated beauty from a poet
writing at her finest.
—Jennifer K. Sweeney, author of Foxlogic, Fireweed