About the Book

Notes on Sea & Shore is among the finest artistic achievements of the late Greta Wrolstad. This sequential poem is a deep, stirring meditation that moves freely between internal and external landscapes. The voice in this work sings from a world in flux, and it does so with a rare, lyrical mastery. This long-awaited volume marks the first publication of Wrolstad's poetry in book form. 

26 copies have been hand-bound into cloth-covered boards. See Special Editions page for ordering information.

"'Suppose we are all unmoored,' says the voice behind this sequence of poems, a traveler who feels the undertow of strangeness in all things, feels the world's constant violent division and re-repair. We leaf through National Geographic, its paper oceans, its terror-visions. 'Imagine you are the page which water has never touched.' We encounter fish scales, photographs, weeds and waters of the sea; exploration in the New World and the physical horror that attends it; starfish splitting apart on rocks. And we hear, inside these poems, the rhythms of steady watchfulness, spare and lush at once, drawn from Moore, Bishop, Niedecker, Sebald. Wrolstad's work has, at its core, an elemental need: to locate what is human within otherworldly and inhuman landscapes. A deep radiant light carries towards us when we least expect it. Below every surface is a weightless interior, a sometimes-terrible liquid suspension, and her gift is to be able to picture, again and again, how we branch and connect--how we might emerge whole." 

—Joanna Klink

ABOUT GRETA WROLSTAD

Greta Wrolstad (1981-2005) was born and raised in Corvallis, Oregon. She died from injuries sustained in a car accident. Wrolstad graduated from the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon and attended the University of Montana's Creative Writing Program, where she served as the poetry editor of CutBank. Among her honors are inclusion in Best New Poets 2007, a scholarship from Fence Books to attend the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a 2008 Pushcart Prize for "Flickers of Light Become the Movement of Thousands." Her poems have appeared in The Canary, Black Warrior Review, A Public Space, Octopus Magazine, and CutBank. In her honor, the University of Montana offers the Greta Wrolstad Travel Award, and the Summer Literary Seminars offers the Greta Wrolstad Scholarship for Young Poets, an annual award given to a female poet under the age of thirty to attend the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg.

20 pages | hand-sewn chapbook | 5.5 x 7.5 in.
ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-09-3