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Book Cover for: Oceanic, Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Oceanic

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Reader Score

81%

81% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Great

Based on 8 reviews on

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With an encyclopedic range of subjects, Nezukumatathil takes a wide-angle look at our planet, its vulnerabilities, and the human condition.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
  • Publish Date: Apr 10th, 2018
  • Pages: 80
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 5.90in - 0.30in - 0.30lb
  • EAN: 9781556595264
  • Categories: American - Asian American & Pacific IslanderSubjects & Themes - Animals & NatureSubjects & Themes - Places

About the Author

Aimee Nezhukumatathil has been widely celebrated for her lush imagination and all-embracing style. Preoccupied with earth science since childhood, Nezhukumatathil crafts her research-based poetry using curious phenomena of the natural world; realizing a vision of strangeness and beauty. Her full-length debut, Miracle Fruit: Poems, won the Tupelo press prize in 2003, followed by her Balcones prize-winning At the Drive-In Volcano. Her third collection, Lucky Fish, was the winner of a gold medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and the prestigious Eric Hoffer Grand Prize for Independent Books. Her many other honors include fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Today Nezhukumatathil serves as the poetry editor of Orion magazine. She teaches creative writing and environmental literature as a professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where she lives with her husband and sons.

More books by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Book Cover for: World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Book Cover for: Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Book Cover for: Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens, Ross Gay
Book Cover for: Lucky Fish, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Book Cover for: At the Drive-In Volcano, Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"Reading Nezhukumatathil's poems is a practice in keenly observing life's details. The poet writes with a romantic sensibility about a world saturated with a deep sense of loss. Recommended for all poetry readers, especially those interested in ecopoetry."--Library Journal


"Sensual and vivid, [Nezhukumatathil's] poems invite us deep into the water, where 'colors humans have / not yet named glow in caves made from black coral and clamshell.' Her images are lush with eroticism, always close to the body and its experience of wonder. She blurs the line between human and animal, casting herself (and her beloved) variously as a scallop, a whale shark, a penguin, a starfish. Such marvelous acts of transformation reshape us as we read."--San Francisco Chronicle


"...from the poetic structures that cultivate dazzling settings to the metaphors that brim with possibility, Oceanic... reawakens my curiosity for a world that still holds so many undiscovered wonders."--The Literary Review


"[Oceanic] is an important work, both for its poetic merits and for its incisive capture of the increasingly precarious nature of life, both human and nonhuman, on this planet."--Ploughshares


"Perfect for readers with a voracious appetite and a burgeoning curiosity."--Lit Hub


"Her poems invoke a sense of connectedness... Nezhukumatathil weaves meditations on parenting and family-making among her lavishly rendered evocations of flora and fauna... Nezhukumatathil's voice is consistent in its awe."--Publishers Weekly


"Oceanic is a generous, romantic, and ambitious look at the different stages of life, and how we experience the love and wonder that lead us to become more fully realized and compassionate as we grow each decade... [it's] Nezhukumatathil's most cohesive collection to date, as she takes her prior preoccupations and dissects them in new ways that invite, as all of her work does, a sense of marvel and astonishment."--Tin House


"I felt renewed wonder at nature's immensities... yet 'wonder, ' a term so often found in responses to Nezhukumatathil's work, aptly describes her poetry's unique relationship to the natural world. Expressing awe, fear, and joy are political acts in Oceanic, particularly in a canon of nature writing that so often erases the voices of people of color." --The Rumpus

"One thing to know about Nezhukumatathil's poems, even when they resemble fragments on a visual plane, is that she is always writing clear sentences whose meanings turn back on themselves or which slowly reveal more of the narrative."--Diane Mehta, Electric Lit

"Reading Nezhukumatathil's poems is a practice in keenly observing life's details. The poet writes with a romantic sensibility about a world saturated with a deep sense of loss. Recommended for all poetry readers, especially those interested in ecopoetry."-Library Journal


"Sensual and vivid, [Nezhukumatathil's] poems invite us deep into the water, where 'colors humans have / not yet named glow in caves made from black coral and clamshell.' Her images are lush with eroticism, always close to the body and its experience of wonder. She blurs the line between human and animal, casting herself (and her beloved) variously as a scallop, a whale shark, a penguin, a starfish. Such marvelous acts of transformation reshape us as we read."--San Francisco Chronicle


"...from the poetic structures that cultivate dazzling settings to the metaphors that brim with possibility, Oceanic... reawakens my curiosity for a world that still holds so many undiscovered wonders."--The Literary Review


"[Oceanic] is an important work, both for its poetic merits and for its incisive capture of the increasingly precarious nature of life, both human and nonhuman, on this planet."--Ploughshares


"Perfect for readers with a voracious appetite and a burgeoning curiosity."--Lit Hub


"Her poems invoke a sense of connectedness... Nezhukumatathil weaves meditations on parenting and family-making among her lavishly rendered evocations of flora and fauna... Nezhukumatathil's voice is consistent in its awe."--Publishers Weekly


"Oceanic is a generous, romantic, and ambitious look at the different stages of life, and how we experience the love and wonder that lead us to become more fully realized and compassionate as we grow each decade... [it's] Nezhukumatathil's most cohesive collection to date, as she takes her prior preoccupations and dissects them in new ways that invite, as all of her work does, a sense of marvel and astonishment."--Tin House


"I felt renewed wonder at nature's immensities... yet 'wonder, ' a term so often found in responses to Nezhukumatathil's work, aptly describes her poetry's unique relationship to the natural world. Expressing awe, fear, and joy are political acts in Oceanic, particularly in a canon of nature writing that so often erases the voices of people of color." --The Rumpus

"One thing to know about Nezhukumatathil's poems, even when they resemble fragments on a visual plane, is that she is always writing clear sentences whose meanings turn back on themselves or which slowly reveal more of the narrative."--Diane Mehta, Electric Lit