ABOUT THIS BOOK

The poems in Talvikki Ansel’s Somewhere in Space work to locate us in this world and its mix of the made and natural, the cultivated and untamable. Faced with such mysteries and intricacies as the water-conducting tissue of trees, the sensory abilities of vultures, the lives of past writers (Edith Södergran, Bruno Schulz), and fragments of history and our tenuous connections to them, the poems acknowledge the difficulty of authority, yet continue with their forays. Invented characters coexist with observations of mergansers and moths, orioles and cats; “Particulars rock / just inside the breakwater / like conjured up skiffs.”

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Talvikki Ansel is the author of the poetry collections My Shining Archipelago and Jetty and Other Poems, and she is a recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award.

REVIEWS

“Talvikki Ansel’s poems in Somewhere in Space create a portal of hope where humans can recover a sense of what it means to be animal on a planet imperiled. Ansel is a twenty-first-century ‘New Englandly’ Dorothy Wordsworth, paying keen, peripatetic, nineteenth-century attention to the salvific slippage among the human, animal, feral, cultured, and terrestrial realms of our moment. The poems in this collection build a cosmology that is atmospheric, pan-geographic, and emotional.” —Lisa R. Spaar

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Leap Years
Mycorrhizae
How It Sounds
Visitors
Their First Houses Were Bark-Roofed Caves
Outpost
Quail
Courtship
Xylem
Dangerous Captain
The Ships
Impossible Herds:
In Captivity
Unsettled Weather
Forest
Swallows
Two Gourds
Baking Soda Trading Cards: Bird Series
Card 8: Baltimore Oriole
Card 4: Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Card 19: Gull
Card 7: Merganser
Card 20: Mute Swan
Card 3: Crested Flycatcher
Seed Savers
Coil / Foil / Ribbon / Loft
Tell the Story of the Whale
Loft
Places to Swim
If the Vulture Chooses You
Jealousy, Enkidu
History of Private Life
Sinbad & Skylark
Here’s the Sea
Valentine’s
After the Party
Wintering, Witness
Migrant: Philohela minor
Don’t Tell Me
Entomology
Calendar
The Encyclopedia of Moths
Glaze
The Garden Whisperer
Glacial Erratic
Chrysanthemums
Somewhere in Space
[Calico gray, rag-tag she chose our crawl space]
[They know their terrain, their paths]
[“On foot”]
[In a week they are gone, did the mother]
[After I dumped the failed jelly by the rotten]
[If you count the catalogue of cats]
[A lens of cloud, a sighting around a sheet]
[Coming back into the yard something’s off]
[She is back, the one-eyed cat, trapped]
[Edith Södergran, also holding the leash]
Town Runway
Days of the Pharaoh
Apples

AWARDS

"Winner of the 2014 Ohio State University Press/The journal award in poetry"