Castaway

Sarah Stockton's collection of poems Castaway beautifully exhibits what the poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield has termed "oceanic" thinking-a generosity of attention to connection between the facts of the physical world, and our feelings about them. Watery, fragile, ephemeral-these adjectives describe the speaker's environment, body, and relationship to others. I love these poems because there is something unsafe about them, a glinting of sunlight off the water that startles the reader awake. Stockton's attention challenges our social institutions and complacent thinking, sees both the suffering human sitting on the church pew and the self's smallness of response. Yet what natural joy to be found in these poems, which remind us that "joy abides in the body like an octopus." You will want to carry the place of these poems with you.