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Freshly Rooted Poems by EMILY WALL
How does a new marriage in a new geography change the landscape of self?
How does one woman find what it means to live in Alaska?
This collection begins with the speaker, one week married, stepping aboard the Alaska State Ferry Malaspina as she embarks on her new life in the North Country. The poems, loosely narrative, follow her struggle to navigate the new country of marriage, and to speak the new language of self, in a land of reinvention.
Like a shapeshifting salmon reaching its birth stream, the speaker reimages herself, to make a new place as familiar as home.
Emily Wall studied poetry at Colby College and received her MFA from the University of Arizona. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Alaska Southeast.
Emily has published in a wide variety of literary journals and has won several poetry prizes. She and her husband live in Douglas, Alaska.
Freshly Rooted
Late Sunday three tourists stop to watch dog salmon running in Gold Creek.
The three seem stunned. Maybe moved, maybe not, but still in the face of this rush of water, battered bodies thrashing, gaining on the stream.
Their pausing makes me look closer. I see quicksilver bodies growing accustomed to fresh water, the smell filling their noses, the rightness of this place.
I see the way their bodies submit, shapeshift to fit this new water, and I am filled with envy.
Coming soon...
