About this item
Highlights
- The lyrical poems in Surfacing follow a woman into the wilderness of childbirth and child-rearing.
- Author(s): Emily Tuszynska
- 86 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
Book Synopsis
The lyrical poems in Surfacing follow a woman into the wilderness of childbirth and child-rearing. Imbued with vivid details and with elements of the natural world, they are poems of spirit, of timelessness, and of expanding love "radiating out...a dispersal of the self."
Review Quotes
To read Surfacing is to be enfolded in the miracles of ordinary life-the birth of an infant, the trees' way of weaving sunlight and shade over the roof of a small house, the smell of sawdust from freshly cut boards, the rising moon as it "floats through the window/like a slow bubble through syrup." The voice, subtle and steady and perfectly modulated, allows us to enter the world of the poems in a state of trust, open to their transformative joy and meditative sorrow. I am grateful for this deeply embodied work, for Tuszynska's luminous gifts.
-Jennifer Barber, author of The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made
Surfacing is a steady, undivided run of poems, in the tradition of Anne Bradstreet, honoring a life lived-"the one I chose"-a life that got away from the speaker and welcomed three children-"a wilderness... // a taste I hadn't known / I craved"... I so admire the way these poems think under the aspect of "the unstoppable unfurling"-a life set on the "scattering" edge of the natural world, in a "small house," and asking "How does one live / with one's whole heart?"
-Brad Davis, author of Trespassing on the Mount of Olives
In Emily Tuszynska's debut collection, poems as clear and mysterious as cold lake water, immerse the reader in the intimate knowing and being known of familial love. What a pleasure to enter and listen to these songs of deep joy, a joy interfused with awareness of fragility and danger. Child by child by child, as the poet celebrates and endures the exhaustion and generosity of motherhood, she asks herself, "How does one fully inhabit one's life?"
-Jennifer Atkinson, author of A Gray Realm the Ocean
In Emily Tuszynska's debut poetry collection Surfacing, winner of the 2023 Grayson Books Poetry Contest, the speaker traces how a mother constantly self-divides and reemerges, "full of tenderness and dread." The poems move between wonder at the world made new with an infant's arrival, admiration for ordinary domestic routines, and persistent questions about being whole and living fully despite the way motherhood fragments the self. Dedicated to her three children, "who grew along with this book" and to her parents, Surfacing highlights the compelling beauty in motherhood's paradoxes.
-Katie Kalisz, Mom Egg Review