Sandra Meek is the author of six previous books of poetry, most recently Still (a New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy title) and An Ecology of Elsewhere, which earned her the 2017 Georgia Author of the Year and the 2017 Peace Corps Writers Award in the poetry categories. She is also the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad. Meek is Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric and Writing at Berry College.

Bind
Sandra Meek

Using an apocryphal etymology from Dante as a springboard, the urgent and darkly comic poems in Bind emerge from Sandra Meek’s ongoing engagement with language and place. Set in locales as far-flung as Borneo and as close to home as the rural Georgia college where Meek long taught, the collection grapples with the dilemma of accelerating environmental destruction, which connects us all despite political insistence on its divisiveness. These poems are concerned with wildness and capture, with species on the brink—whether the Indri indri of Madagascar or the edible-nest swiftlets of Borneo. In Bind, the power and pleasure of language is as tangible as the beauty of the natural world, which Meek seeks out in all its surviving incarnations.

“Nothing excites quite like those poems that evince the poet’s joy in the exploration of formal restrictions. If a reader is lucky, she will encounter one or two of these in a good book of poems. Once or twice in a lifetime she will come across a book like Sandra Meek’s Bind, in which the joy of exploration radiates from almost every poem. The vowels in these poems aren’t bound, they’re freed. Meek has tapped into something here every poet is dowsing for. I read Bind in awe.”
—Shane McCrae

“Meek’s prescient poetry has long dwelled darkly on humanity’s environmental impact.”
—The New York Times Book Review

Paperback / $19.00 (Can. $27.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-654-0 / 112 pages / Poetry