Eva Saulitis, an essayist, poet, and marine biologist, has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Alaska for 25 years. Her first book, Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2008), was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Non-Fiction Prize and the ForeWord Book Award. Her second non-fiction book, Into Great Silence, is forthcoming from Beacon Press. A recipient of writing fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska State Council on the Arts, she is an associate professor in the University of Alaska Low-Residency MFA program.
"Eva Saulitis is a poet who inhabits the planet with all her senses
attuned. Many Ways to Say It is a collection rich with acute
observation of the non-human denizens of the world, botanical,
animal, mineral, and rich in characters, too, from Linnaeus, the
father of taxonomy, to Shakespeare's Cordelia. These poems
metamorphose through the book in form and voice, holding image and
thought up to an endless light, examining and singing all the
refractions and possibilities. Many Ways to Say It is a stunning
debut collection of poems we readers can trust and inhabit and
relish."--Derick Burleson, author of Ejo and Never Night
"Eva Saulitis is part of nature--seawater and glacial ice, alder
marsh and birch forest. She's part scientist, part oboist, part
lover, part Latvian, part Alaskan. Her smart and passionate poems
bring us wildly alive. These new poems enact an eternal thirst for
mindful, spiritual, fully-embodied ways of thinking and feeling.
Open and curious, Eva Saulitis embraces with an 'injured and
blistered amen' the longings, the terrors, and the glories of our
brief time on this ever-changing earth."--Peggy Shumaker, author of
Gnawed Bones, Alaska State Writer Laureate
"Naturalist and writer Eva Saulitis' stunning new book melts
(marries) the gorgeous and dangerous natural world with the moist,
hidden geography of the female body. These poems are miraculous
songs of grief and pressure. They refuse to let the reader
(listener) turn away. We can't refuseto hear the poet's 'many ways
of saying' that life comes and comes and comes, no matter what the
cost. A wonderful book."
--Hilda Raz, author of What Happens and All Odd and Splendid
"Since reading Eva Saulitis' book of essays, Leaving Resurrection,
I have been eager to see more of her work. Now, this collection of
poems offers a whole and wholly different engagement with the
world. The 'Injured and blistered amen' of Many Ways to Say It
blends a naturalist's observations, interior investigation, and
deep wonder in poems that revel in and interrogate the world they
spring from. Language and sound echo in new ways ('the kettle's
hiss, the GPS'), and there's a formal range that amplifies the
pleasure of the poems' subjects. The Cordelia poems, which engage
with muskeg, domesticity, and the life of Linnaeus, are the core of
this book. Here, Saulitis shows how her verse grows from the
physical world (red squirrel, skunk cabbage, mending) and into the
historic, emotional, and literary. It's a reach and scope that
thrills. What strikes me is the deliberate unfinishment of many of
the poems--Saulitis uses form and syntax to illustrate that her
work is part of a larger, ongoing story. Reading the poems of this
book is like dipping into a river, looking around under water, and
then rising to breathe again, refreshed and quickened. --Elizabeth
Bradfield, author of Interpretive Work and Approaching Ice
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