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Shipbreaking

One of BuzzFeed's “16 Best Poetry Books of 2015” and “24 Best Literary Debuts of 2015”

Robin Beth Schaer’s startling first collection of poetry, Shipbreaking, charts a beautiful and dangerous journey where seas rise, mastodons roam, aeronauts float overhead, bodies electrify, and a child is born as a ship wrecks in a hurricane. The speaker here is curious and fierce, consulting scientists, philosophers, ancient maps, fossil bones, and lovers in order to survive and understand the strange majesty of living. With empathy and exaltation, the poems collapse the distance between natural disasters and human struggles, interweaving relationships between the upheavals and renewals that both the heart and Earth undergo.

“In Schaer's voluminous, shipwrecked world, everything is beautiful and no one is safe — it is from this suffering that song is created. This is a gorgeous debut from a smart, incisive young poet.”  — Publishers Weekly starred review

“Robin Beth Schaer emerges as a lyrical force to be reckoned with in Shipbreaking”  — San Francisco Chronicle

“‘Love is haywire’ Robin Beth Schaer writes in one of her passionate lyrics; love for ‘my consort, my lovely undoing,’ and for the seagoing vessels that haunt these lines, and for a young son whose future depends on the fate of another beloved, this world in which ‘under the city / aquifer fills with seawater / slowly drawing the avenues down.’ Schaer’s language and her passion operate under the increasingly inescapable pressure of limit, and the result is something beautiful and broken, like this moment.”  — Mark Doty

“Shipbreaking’s ultra-taut lines urge departure, a kind of experiential upsweep. And they keen just as convincingly toward the steady grounding of land, home and the embrace of the beloved as they do toward the wind-racked surface and unknowable depths of the sea — constants in Schaer’s mythology, which foster “that skyward longing, to be untethered.’”  — Tracy K. Smith

“To read Robin Beth Schaer’s Shipbreaking is to know a body: its grave intimacy and intense delight. Its muscles and eyelashes, its shadows that make for instant dawns. The intelligence of Schaer’s lines humbles me. I am seduced utterly. Please join me beneath the waters of these poems, for here the mermaids speak to us each to each: candidly, cannily. Hand your heart over to this most stunning debut.”  — Cate Marvin

“Robin Beth Schaer’s Shipbreaking offers both catalogue and hymn. Swooping between the history of human flight and the upsurges of continents, between the migrations of birds and the igniting of love, Schaer toggles between the cosmic and the intimate, brilliantly weaving a tapestry of gorgeous, sometimes painful, interconnectness. Schaer is alert both to the rawness of the elements and the work of human hands. Her poetry charts a natural history which includes us, but not only us. The child unfurling in the womb, the city flooded in storm, the ship lost at sea: Schaer registers all with a striking combination of gorgeous gaud and stark specificity. Her poems conduct the materiality of this world, its ‘kevlar, duct tape, / and prayer,’ its bees, coelacanths, and human infants; the constellations beyond and the power of the seas. This Robin both soars and sings the ‘shoaled world.’”  — Maureen McLane

“Shipbreaking is a stunning book about being awake. Robin Beth Schaer spins her readers through the wires, storms, and electricity between us — with great precision of language and line. This is the voice of an explorer, a speaker of wild courage. ‘Love / is haywire,’ she says, ‘Current is the cure / for both a stopped heart and one that beats / too much.’ Brimming with recognition of conditions both human and otherworldly, Schaer speaks as guide and messenger, creating a ‘... spark... in a great loneliness.’ This is a moving, necessary book.”  — Jan Beatty

Cover Art: Leslie Baum. Mementos: C.B., 2014. Oil on sintra. 

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781934695449
  • Genres
  • poetry, adult
  • Release date
  • 2015