Kinetic poems of dying and living from the author of Biogeography.Road Scatter (as in tire-sprayed gravel) is an examination of breakage and survival, compelled by the decline and death of the poet’s mother but engaged, too, by global encounters with the Iraq war, a rabid dog in Africa, and an at-large South American former dictator, for example. Though a book of mourning, it is also one of living, “rising from grief, returning light in all directions.” --Jane Hirshfield

Road Scatter: Poems (Karen & Michael Braziller Books)

Literature & Fiction

Meek, Sandra

Poetry

Persea

In these gorgeous new poems, Sandra Meek guides us through exquisitely rendered landscapes both terrestrial and emotional, from the deserts and deltas of Sub-Saharan Africa to the bruised terrain of the fragile human heart. Following her mother's death, nearly twenty years after her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Sandra Meek began traveling extensively through Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. During this same period, she and her sister also traveled the American Southwest with their declining father, confronting and healing from a difficult family history before his death. Whether describing a Namibian baby seal hunt, 1500-year-old Welwitschia plants living off of fog in a desert studded with landmines, or the sandstone “temples” of Zion National Park, Meek’s poems attend to the endangered as well as the enduring, braiding personal narrative with those of the natural world from which they arise. At once nomadic and deeply rooted to place, An Ecology of Elsewhere interweaves a difficult past (personal and terrestrial) with an uncertain future.

An Ecology of Elsewhere: Poems

In her fierce new collection, poet Sandra Meek subverts Renaissance still-life painting in order to illuminate the perhaps irreparable natural and cultural harm inflicted by colonial forces, even those that manage to create a certain beauty from imperial spoils.
Still re-imagines the Renaissance concept of the studiolo, a room displaying cabinets of wonder, each juxtaposing human-made art objects, such as miniature still-life paintings, with natural ones―harbingers of the coming wonders and catastrophes of travel brought back from distant lands Europeans claimed as “discoveries.”
These poems shimmer with the wonders of the natural and aesthetic worlds―and in doing so, reckon with environmental, colonial, and sexual violence, with the oppression of silencing as well as the reclamation of voice. In confronting violations of body, family, culture, and nature, Still gives voice and image not only to what is still, what has been stilled, and what is in danger of being forever stilled, but also to the marvel of survival.

Still: Poems

The Circumference of Arrival

Elixir Press

Poetry. Scientists use the word "biogeography" for the geographical distribution of plant and animal life. Sandra Meek's Biogeography is a powerful metaphysical meditation on the connections between us humans and the larger natural world. Her elegant verse entwines public and private histories, unleashing them in fascinating habitats, ranging from a remote forest village accessible only by boat to the poet's own small backyard overrun with honeysuckle. Her lines travel these disparate landscapes, focusing on the wanton desecration of the land, while simultaneously seeking to inspire a new sense of wonder, a new registry of fresh and creative inspiration. In Meek's poems, the word and the world are inextricably linked. There is room for flamboyant faith and a new nomenclature of wonder. BIOGEOGRAPHY is Sandra Meek's third collection of poetry and is the winner of the Dorset Prize. Meek was also a four-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded Editors' Choice for the 2002 James Wright Award, given by Mid-American Review, and she won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry and the Peace Corps Writers Award for Poetry in 2003. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, while many others and have been featured on the websites Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poetry Net's "Poet of the Month." Meek is an associate professor of English, rhetoric, and writing at Berry College, where she teaches creative writing and contemporary literature.

Biogeography

Tupelo Press