Undertow
Anne Shaw

Winner of the 2007 Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize.

This impressive debut is propelled by wanderlust, its music derived from the rumble of freight trains and the heave of ferries through literal and imaginative waterways. Whether set in Maine or in Arizona, in Ecuador or in Thailand, in waking or in dreaming, each poem resounds with the beauty and remoteness of its locality. Re-imaginings of travelogues by some notable explorers and naturalists, including Sir Walter Raleigh and Georg Eberhard Rumphius, underscore the collection's restless yearning for motion. Undertow marks the emergence of a distinctive new voice.

“Anne Shaw's impressive first collection, Undertow, is an exploration, in the key of doubt, of all that moves below the surface of a cosmos riddled with light....  She is brilliantly exact, noticing the way a ‘greenbottle fly/ alights on a grain of rice.’ Such exactitude is rare, as is this poet's synthesizing vision.”
—Carolyn Forché

“The poems in Undertow—luminous, clairvoyant, and radiant—are spun as if from the finest silk, the threads almost invisible, their tensile strength unimaginably strong. Few debuts are as candid and uncanny, generous and fierce, or elaborate and distilled as Anne Shaw's first book is.”
—Eric Pankey

Anne Shaw is the author of Dido in Winter. Her poems have appeared widely in such journals such as Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, and Prairie Schooner. Recipient of an MFA in poetry from George Mason University, she is currently pursuing an MFA in sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Paperback / $14.00 / ISBN 978-0-89255-338-9 / 84 pages / Poetry

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