What Surrounds You

Here is a book you will want to read more than once, first to dip into the poems, then a second time to savor the words, slowly immersing in them. Roxanne Doty’s fine and powerful collection is full of precise imagery, boldness of the senses, and a profound sense of place. Poems take you through an unfolding narrative dispersed across the country. Her straightforward and pure lines of reflection announce themselves: “I see our other selves, / the ones we can never be,” and “write past this moment / name the unnamable.” This collection takes you over highways and underpasses, motels and mobile homes, through our various Americas, from the breaking of families to the spacious wonder of starlight over Arizona mountains.

—Kate Green, author, If the World Is Running Out and Tourist in the Pure Land

In Roxanne Doty’s poetry collection, What Surrounds You, we travel through the poet’s life via her poems. Her mother applying lipstick or driving a car with her as a little girl, not on vacation, but “running.” Her dad who says, “I’ll be right back … Keep the doors locked,” as he heads into a bar, a man who “will break so many responsible father rules. Except the one about love.” Throughout these poems that span years, “fragile as glass, flakes like tiny mirrors,” Doty remains “the child whose heart beat with unwritten poems … who believed anyway in radiance, sunrises and cloud paintings.”

—Susan Vespoli, author, Therefore, Illuminated and One of Them Was Mine

What Surrounds You does exactly that, envelops one in an epic, spanning the vulnerable early childhood through accomplished adult decades. With retrospective clarity, Roxanne Doty details unending hope and ultimate salvation. When Doty points toward the poisonous incarceration that the “American dream” demands, slivers of light prevail, escaping the darkened hallways of addiction, racism, bigotry, and the mortgaging of one’s soul for an Ideal. She dares to examine deeply some painfully beautiful moments from her past.

—Freda Jayne, author, Awake and Dreaming