Our Long Float - by Elizabeth Chapman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Our Long Float is a luminous meditation on what it means to live--and grieve--in relation to the living, the lost, and the land.

From the elephants of Botswana to the trout streams of Montana, Chapman moves through landscapes both physical and emotional, listening closely to what memory, silence, and connection reveal. Grounded in the spirit of ubuntu-- am because you are--these poems honor presence and impermanence, weaving elegy, ecology, and love into a body of work that feels at once deeply intimate and profoundly expansive."--Hélène Cardona

Review Quotes

"Our Long Float is a luminous meditation on what it means to live--and grieve--in relation to the living, the lost, and the land. From the elephants of Botswana to the trout streams of Montana, Chapman moves through landscapes both physical and emotional, listening closely to what memory, silence, and connection reveal. Grounded in the spirit of ubuntu-- am because you are--these poems honor presence and impermanence, weaving elegy, ecology, and love into a body of work that feels at once deeply intimate and profoundly expansive."--Hélène Cardona

Praise for Elizabeth Chapman:

"Elizabeth...writes with vigor and soul--her luminous poems shine like beacons."--Naomi Shihab Nye

"What a lovely image with its powerful metaphors of light and death, life and living illuminations all inseparable, and the brevity and cruelty and rush of the moment in it. The strain of memory, grief, recurring light plays all through the poems."--W S Merwin

"This is a book of the impossible--finding a fiercely consoling song not in spite of this mortal coil but because of it. Nimble, vivid and fully inhabited, Elizabeth Chapman's poems are personal in the truest sense: accessible to our own deepest feelings."--Dean Young

About the Author

Elizabeth Chapman's poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Santa Clara Review, Water-Stone Review, Poet Lore, Blueline, and Rattle. Her chapbook, Creekwalker, was published by (M)other Tongue Press (1995). She has seen two full-length collections into print: Candlefish (University of Arkansas Press, 2004) and Light Thickens (Ashland Poetry Press, 2009). The latter was awarded the Robert McGovern Prize. In 2020, The Orchard Street Press published her chapbook, Midnight Exhibition at the Wheatgrass Saloon.