Inland Sea

"I know the words now if not the facts," Lynn Domina writes in her piercingly honest new book, Inland Sea. That sea is her beloved Lake Superior. It's also the history that churns and laps inside Domina and inside all of us. Here are poems that confront various ways we might disappear: in music, in water, in anger, or in the slow fade of an old polaroid. Here, too, are poems that remind us where we find our lives: in driftwood, ice, maps, spruce, sparrows, pencils, cookbooks, kindness, and, yes, in the very places we might also disappear. In navigating what we remember, what we forget, and what we regret, Domina performs an act of communion for all who believe and all who don't. These poems are devasting and incantatory. They come from life, and they will remind you how to live.

-Cindy Hunter Morgan, author of Harborless and Far Company

Inland Sea limns the frosted, shivery sublime of Lake Superior. In this paean to "brutal storms" and "crushed ice banks," Domina's awareness is shaped by danger, the black bear that may break into more than the ice cream truck and the hidden erosions formed by unspoken words in any season. The ringing, forthright beauty of these poems and the bracing evocation of a Michigan landscape emerge from a voice that earns trust. You believe Lynn Domina when she says "I want to live / here forever."

-Lee Upton, author of The Day Every Day Is

These poems are themselves psalms, but ones full of the stuff of the world, messy and ordinary and beautiful and divine, psalms the kind Kinnell would sing or Clifton or Stone. Very often, reading these poems I would find myself stunned fine with wonder. This book contains wisdoms of many lifetimes.

-Kazim Ali, author of Inquisition and Sky Ward