An Ecology of Elsewhere: Poems - Tapa blanda

Following her mother's death, nearly twenty years after her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Sandra Meek began traveling extensively through Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. During this same period, she and her sister also traveled the American Southwest with their declining father, confronting and healing from a difficult family history before his death. Whether describing a Namibian baby seal hunt, 1500-year-old Welwitschia plants living off of fog in a desert studded with landmines, or the sandstone “temples” of Zion National Park, Meek’s poems attend to the endangered as well as the enduring, braiding personal narrative with those of the natural world from which they arise. At once nomadic and deeply rooted to place, An Ecology of Elsewhere interweaves a difficult past (personal and terrestrial) with an uncertain future.

Sandra Meek is the author of four books of poems and the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad. She is the recipient of the 2015 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Meek is cofounding Editor of Ninebark Press, Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College. She lives in Rome, Georgia.