{"product_id":"field-notes-from-the-flood-zone","title":"Field Notes from the Flood Zone","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Florida Book Awards Bronze Medal for Poetry\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrom the frontlines of climate catastrophe, a poet watches the sea approach her doorstep.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003eBorn and raised in Florida, Heather Sellers grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. The natural world provided a life-giving respite from domestic violence. She found, in the tropical flora and fauna, great beauty and meaningful connection. She made her way by trying to learn the name of every flower, every insect, every fish and shell and tree she encountered.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003eThat world no longer exists.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003eIn this collection of poems, Sellers laments its loss, while observing, over the course of a year, daily life of the people and other animals around her, on her street, and in her low-lying coastal town, where new high rises soar into the sky as the storm clouds gather with increasing intensity and the future of the community—and seemingly life as we know it—becomes more and more uncertain.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003eSprung from her daily observation journals, haunted by ghosts from the past, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003eField Notes from the Flood Zone\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e is a double love letter: to a beautiful and fragile landscape, and to the vulnerable young girl who grew up in that world. It is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003ePraise for \u003cem\u003eField Notes from the Flood Zone\u003c\/em\u003e\n\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e\"While there has been plenty of apocalyptic fiction written about the likely effects of global warming, poets have been somewhat slower to the game. No more.\" \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e—California Review of Books' Ten Best Books of 2022\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e“Reading Heather Sellers’ new book of poems, I am by turns dazzled, harrowed, fascinated, afraid, and then my mouth falls open coming upon an image or a phrase so lovely and unexpected that I have to close my eyes and let it surround me. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003eField Notes from the Flood Zone\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e is a book so spectacularly original that you don't just read these poems, you steep yourself in them. What a triumph!” \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e—Abigail Thomas, author of \u003ci\u003eSafekeeping\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e“Field Notes from the Flood Zone\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e is a triumph of hard-won vision. Heather Sellers’s South Florida is less travel brochure than tropical storm apocalypse. The land’s menace and music are deftly contained in Sellers’s compulsively readable prose paragraphs, which tell of the speaker’s post-evacuation return to her house where a black snake is ‘rising,\/ uncoiling, a leather tube of silent tune.’ The resiliency of the speaker, alongside her wry observational accuracy and metaphorical skill, leave us buoyed even as we reel from her hard truths, such as when the realtor queries, ‘Is the Property located in a Special Hazard Zone?’ and the speaker answers, ‘The property is located on Earth.’” \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eHeating \u0026amp; Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e“For many years, Heather Sellers has been among the most lyrical and thoughtful chroniclers of Florida, that semi-mythical land of ‘prehistoric fecundities,’ where ‘some nights are made more of water than darkness.’ These are poems full of beautiful images, emotional insights, and pitch-perfect cultural observations— ‘I went to Publix for noodles and Dawn’—but taken together they create something more. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003eField Notes from the Flood Zone\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e feels like an essential book, an indispensable elegy for what will be lost, in the not-too-distant future, when Florida joins Atlantis beneath the waves.” \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Campbell McGrath, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eXX: Poems for the Twentieth Century\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e“In her remarkable \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003eField Notes from the Flood Zone,\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e Heather Sellers’s lucid, soaked and shining poems make landfall at the exact place (and cultural moment) between the terrifying push of extreme storms and the pull of continuing to live an ordinary life. Into the tension between dailiness and emergency comes the fresh loneliness of a woman exed out of a love relationship. Evacuation (in every sense) energizes these Florida poems. It’s rare to call such a crafted book a page turner, but Sellers is driven as she connects the spasms of climate upheaval to emotional turmoil—through urgent rhythms and surprising metaphors. In the apocalyptic, yet matter of fact, brilliantly ordered poems of \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003eField Notes from the Flood Zone,\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003e Heather Sellers brings both nature and human affections startlingly into the 21\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003est \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"\u003ecentury.” \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Molly Peacock, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Analyst: Poems\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch4\u003eDrown\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe guava tree hides its hard, green fruits now—though no one eats\u003cbr\u003ethem, not even the rats.\u003cbr\u003eThe grand old mango leans so hard to the south—trying to escape late\u003cbr\u003elife ankle-deep in salt water, storm-worn.\u003cbr\u003eBlack mildew coats the clay barrel tiles on my roof and every leaf on the\u003cbr\u003epotted lemon tree.\u003cbr\u003eLacy trees sprout from the gutters. It’s like hair springing from the ears\u003cbr\u003eof a lover.\u003cbr\u003eAt night in my bed, almost every night, I dream I’m underwater.\u003cbr\u003eSometimes I breathe underwater. Sometimes I drown face down. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BOA Editions, Ltd.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41022530420907,"sku":"9781950774579","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/products\/FieldNotesFromtheFloodZone_CVR_SM.jpg?v=1633646803","url":"https:\/\/shop.boaeditions.org\/products\/field-notes-from-the-flood-zone","provider":"Boa Editions","version":"1.0","type":"link"}