What seas sing through our bones: Passages through Canada, the United States and Mexico

Description

What seas sing through our bones is a journey poem and a queer love story co-created and recounted during a time of war, censorship and extreme border control, a time much like now. Repurposing the bravado and longing of an almost entirely masculine-heroic history of seafaring stories, logbooks and poems to its own feminist end, the narrative asks, “What difference does it make who speaks or listens?”  

In a voyage that runs from Nova Scotia to San Diego, then along the Pacific coast of Mexico’s Baja peninsula into the Sea of Cortez, the poem’s narrators relate the marvels and disasters they encounter as they move from one language to another, and between land and sea.

Haunted by the echoes and instructions of earlier wayfarers, strange sightings and species extinctions, the poem’s narrative unfolds in the complicated affections among women lovers, living bodies and the resounding sea. No journey is ever really undertaken alone. Every action (whether sorting what to pack, gathering guides to help face the unknown, or worrying about who or what is left behind) reaches backward and forward in time. Still, not all such co-voyagers are equally good companions. When at sea, the important challenge is to learn to listen through so much human noise to other kinds of reverberations, even for the silences of worlds disappearing. 

In poetry that bears witness to the wonders, preoccupations, and life and death matters of going to sea in waters often poorly charted, What seas sing through our bones is a hymn for everyone. 

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