“Where Bishop’s art tended to be on the threshold between the visual and the visionary, Anderson’s swerve from her great precursor adheres to the visual, and yet teases from it what can be seen as an intimation at once immanent and transcendental.”
Harold Bloom
“Doubtful Harbor charts an intrepid journey to regions as remote as Shanghai, Fiesole, the Peloponnese, an orchard in Macedonia, a silk factory in Suzhou … Watched over by the guardian spirits of Elizabeth Bishop and Virginia Woolf, Anderson writes with the passion and uncanny precision of a poet in full possession of her powers. Doubtful Harbor is a uniquely accomplished book by a uniquely talented poet. A wonderful achievement.”
Sherod Santos
In Doubtful Harbor, Idris Anderson turns wandering into art. From large landscapes to the minutest details, she seeks with each poem to convey the world more clearly, acutely, and exquisitely. As she meditates on indelible moments with intimate others, friends, and strangers, she teases from these encounters their elusive connections and disconnections. As Sherod Santos wrote when selecting the book for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, “These are not the journeys of a tourist, but of a wandering solitaire whose purpose is not to maintain a travelogue, but to lose herself in the otherness of her surroundings.”
Doubt is itself a driving force here, an engine of both questing and questioning. As exact as Anderson’s eye is, her poems draw energy from ambiguity as she renders interior and exterior landscapes—foreign and domestic, lovely and littered, familiar and strange.
Idris Anderson’s first book, Mrs. Ramsay’s Knee, was selected by Harold Bloom for the May Swenson Prize. Anderson has also won a Pushcart Prize and the Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Hudson Review, Paris Review, Southern Review, ZYZZYVA and other journals. Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, she has lived for more than two decades in the San Francisco Bay area. More info →
Retail price:
$16.95 ·
Save 20% ($13.56)
US and Canada only
Availability and price vary according to vendor.
Share 
Permission to reprint
Permission
to photocopy or include in a course pack
via Copyright Clearance
Center
Paperback
978-0-8214-2317-2
Retail price: $16.95,
T.
Release date: March 2018
114 pages
·
5½ × 8½ in.
Rights: World
Electronic
978-0-8214-4631-7
Release date: March 2018
114 pages
Rights: World
Penumbra
Poems
By Michael Shewmaker
Penumbra—Michael Shewmaker’s debut collection—explores the half-shadows of a world torn between faith and doubt. From intricate descriptions of the rooms in a dollhouse, to the stark depiction of a chapel made of bones, from pre-elegies for a ghostly father, to his compelling treatment of his obsessed, human characters (a pastor, a tattoo artist, a sleepwalker, to name only a few), these are poems that wrestle with what it means to believe in something beyond one’s own mortality.
Animal Purpose
Poems
By Michelle Y. Burke
In Animal Purpose, Michelle Y. Burke explores the lives of men and women as they stand poised between the desire to love and the compulsion to harm. She scours the hard edges of the world to find “fleeting softness,” which she wishes “into the world like pollen that covers everything.”
The Surface of the Lit World
Poems
By Shane Seely
In The Surface of the Lit World, Shane Seely draws on a wide range of sources — from personal memory to biblical narrative — to explore the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, the ways in which we make meaning of our lives. Seely delves into the ways in which family and environment shape us. Poems ranging from terse, meditative lyrics to more direct narratives examine the relationship between what lies visible on the lit surface and what lies just beneath.
On the Desire to Levitate
Poems
By Alison Powell
On the Desire to Levitate is the first collection of poems by Alison Powell. This striking collection includes vivid, unflinching meditations on aging, mythology, poetry, and family. In tight, elegant lines that alternate between homage and elegy, these poems explore known subjects with a rebellious eye: a defeated Hercules and a bitter Eurydice, a sympathetic Lucifer, and generations of adolescent girls as mythical adventurers moving within a beloved but confining Midwest.
