Flood Plain
When water overflows a river’s banks, adjacent flood plains will respond with processes of absorption and dissipation. For the poet, such landscapes are models for damage control, a potential source of hope, and perhaps endurance, in an age of ongoing ecological disaster. In her stunning fifth collection, Flood Plain, Lisa Sewell finds fertile ground on which to examine the urgent questions of our age: What does it mean to live on a dying planet? How are we, as humans, meant to respond? And how, at last, can we grieve?
The poems of Flood Plain might be put forward as a type of evidence, data or samples carefully collected for study. But they are also much more than this—they are the poet's own testimonies, first-hand records revealing, page after page, her powers of observation and witness. “The flood plain is a field again,” Sewell writes in “Restorative Justice,” a reminder that natural disasters take many forms. “The flowers will last until the first snow / of winter as everything conspires / to bury us in what we couldn’t see or imagine.” Indeed, poetry may be our flood plain: the site on which we absorb these truths, and the means to process the weight of it all.
“Flood Plain examines and inhabits the Anthropocene from a deeply human vulnerability. Personal grief dwells within the ‘gleam or flash’ that is a lifetime. Place names, sites, animals, are brought forward—not as distanced objects to be described—but as living beings with much to teach us. The rigor and beauty of this poetry reveals itself newly every time I read it; it is steeped in detail and urgency.”
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Lisa Sewell knows that death is alive, always at work undoing what we love. Weaving together elegies for beloved elders and odes to extinct, endangered, and charismatic species, Flood Plain loves and grieves in ways specific to the 21st century, expertly tracking the fractal nature of ecological relation and loss across scales, mindfully moving from micro to macro and back again. Whether alive with wildfire or fluctuant with tide, poem after poem offers an ‘objective correlative/for what I cannot feel / as everything extinguishes around us.’ This book is uniquely attuned to the beauty and tenacity of the burning world.”
“Though the lyrics in Lisa Sewell’s Flood Plain may appear quiet on the surface, soaked with small and daily details as they are, soon one hears that they resound—not only with the magnitudes present in the shale and lake and forests of the world, but with the immense choruses of life and death that any human that lives must find a way to live through. And that’s what I love about Flood Plain the most: all its supplication and praise, the way it helps with the living-through”
About the Author
Lisa Sewell is the author of The Way Out, Name Withheld, Impossible Object, and Birds of North America, an artist’s book collaboration with Susan Hagen and Nathalie Anderson. She has edited several essay collections for Wesleyan University Press that focus on twenty-first century North American poetry and poetics, including North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language, with Kazim Ali, and American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, with Claudia Rankine. She has received grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, and has held residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Tyrone Guthrie Center and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, among others. She teaches in the English Department at Villanova University and divides her time between Philadelphia and White Salmon, WA.
