“A deft naturalist with a keen eye for details of nature, human and nonhuman. . . . Bradfield’s poems delight.”―San Francisco Chronicle This collection portrays the gripping history of polar exploration by channeling its most notable figures―Symmes, Mawson, Scott, Cherry-Garrard, Byrd, and Shackleton among them. From their perspectives and her own, Elizabeth Bradfield relays the wonders and dangers, physical and mental, encountered while endeavoring to reach the earth’s least-hospitable regions.

Approaching Ice: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Bradfield, Elizabeth

Poetry

Persea

Set mostly on or off the coast of Cape Cod, poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield continues her ongoing exploration of humans in their natural habitat―and, at times, at odds with it. Known for her poetic portrayals of polar expeditions throughout the ages, Elizabeth Bradfield explores environments remote and local, ecological and interior, in these enthralling new poems. Whether afloat on the Amazon or wandering her home turf of Cape Cod, Bradfield connects her natural surroundings with the most essential of human longings.

Once Removed: Poems

Sofar

Natural history, work, queerness, and family collide in Interpretive Work. When they do, a deep stubborn will emerges, a belief in the unexpected beauty of the world "flaws and all. The poems of this collection foreground the role of the viewer" the interpreter "smudging self across what's seen."
 From neighborhood kids cussing in the cul-de-sac to marbled murrelets calling in Southeast Alaska, the poems of this book reach toward a moment where one finds "this unsettlement, / this beauty applauded at last."
 Bradfield delivers her bruised truths through a quiet honesty that stands in ardent defense of mainstream normative expectations. A male singer has a woman's high, sweet voice, redefining beauty. A female deer grows antlers. A woman chooses to be child-free without regret. As a whole, these poems furtively suggest that the tourist on the sunset cruise ship misinterprets the cravings of humpback whales in the same way Bradfield's family, neighbors and bureaucratic officials misunderstand love, sexuality and gender.

Interpretive Work: Poems

Arktoi Books

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.

Toward Antarctica

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Boreal Books

In Theorem, a collaboration by poet Elizabeth Bradfield and artist Antonia Contro, spare images, distilled text, and the resonant space between investigate the legacy of secrets acquired in childhood and held through a life. Part visual interrogation of shapes and forms, part lyrical bewilderment at the interface of memory and geometry, Theorem charts a luminous path of self-discovery that unsettles and upends. Theorem's collaboration opens possibilities beyond the simple life-changing epiphany. As John Yau writes, "The revelation is not in arriving at a destination but in beginning to map the journey, as well as in recognizing that one's perspective of past events changes as time goes by. This is the enigma of being alive and alert. This is what Theorem offers the willing reader---a place to return to in order to set out again and see what has changed." Using tropes drawn from math and science in both text and images, Theorem grapples again and again with how to find certainty and clarity within the chaos of lived experience.

Theorem

Individual Artists

Poetry Northwest Editions

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