“In her new and marvelous book, Drift Ice, Jennifer Atkinson evokes the natural world with preternatural clarity…This is a beautiful book, mature, exciting, innovative, and unforgettable.” -Alan Shapiro

“I don’t know of another poet who can, in Thoreau’s words, so beautifully ‘impress the winds and streams into [her] service.’” -Allison Funk

The poems in Drift Ice view the natural world through a lens of ecological and spiritual concerns. They focus especially on Prince William Sound in Alaska fifteen years after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, Long Island Sound at the estuarial mouth of the Connecticut River, and Sri Lanka before (and, in one poem, after) the tsunami. The poems address the myth of a once-pristine wilderness and the indifferent, ever-changing nature of “nature” and our human place in it, as they also investigate the flexibility and lambency of lyric form.

Jennifer Atkinson is the author of two collections of poetry: The Dogwood Tree, which won the University of Alabama Poetry Prize, and The Drowned City, winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction can be seen in many leading journals and have been honored with Pushcart Prizes. She taught in Nepal, in Japan, at the University of Iowa, and at Washington University before joining the faculty of George Mason University.

Publication date: April 2008

Read an excerpt of Drift Ice.