An Ecology of Elsewhere: Poems Format: Paperback

In these gorgeous new poems, Sandra Meek guides us through exquisitely rendered landscapes both terrestrial and emotional, from the deserts and deltas of Sub-Saharan Africa to the bruised terrain of the fragile human heart.

Following her mother's death, nearly twenty years after her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Sandra Meek began traveling extensively through Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. During this same period, she and her sister also traveled the American Southwest with their declining father, confronting and healing  from a difficult family history before his death. Whether describing a Namibian baby seal hunt, 1500-year-old Welwitschia plants living off of fog in a desert studded with landmines, or the sandstone “temples” of Zion National Park, Meek’s poems attend to the endangered as well as the enduring, braiding personal narrative with those of the natural world from which they arise. At once nomadic and deeply rooted to place, An Ecology of Elsewhere interweaves a difficult past (personal and terrestrial) with an uncertain future.

Sandra Meek is the author of six previous books of poetry, most recently Still (a New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy title) and An Ecology of Elsewhere, which earned her the 2017 Georgia Author of the Year and the 2017 Peace Corps Writers Award in the poetry categories. She is also the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad. Meek is Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric and Writing at Berry College.