Neko Redux
ignored in near distance
a leopard seal yawns
Feature Date
- February 26, 2020
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Jennifer Atkinson
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“Neko Redux” is from Toward Antarctica: An Exploration by Elizabeth Bradfield
(Red Hen Press © 2019).
Republished with permission from the publisher.
Cotton Coulson
Writer/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and Toward Antarctica which combines her photographs with brief, hybrid essays. Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro, is forthcoming this fall. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she works as a naturalist/guide and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University.
Visit her website at: www.ebradfield.com.
Poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield's fourth collection, Toward Antarctica, documents and queries her work as a guide on ships in Antarctica, offering an incisive insider's vision that challenges traditional tropes of The Last Continent. Inspired by haibun, a stylistic form of Japanese poetry invented by 17th-century poet, Matsuo Bashō to chronicle his journeys in remote Japan, Bradfield uses photographs, compressed prose, and short poems to examine our relationship to remoteness, discovery, expertise, awe, labor, temporary societies, "pure" landscapes, and tourism's service economy. Antarctica was the focus of Bradfield's Approaching Ice, written before she had set foot on the continent; now Toward Antarctica furthers her investigation with boots on the ground. A complicated love letter, Toward Antarctica offers a unique view of one of the world's most iconic wild places.
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.