Water Signs

by Liz Kellebrew

Written while riding the ferry across Puget Sound, Liz Kellebrew's poems explore the liminal places between cities and forests, animals and people, the sky and the sea. This gorgeous and impactful debut gazes unflinchingly at the twin crises of climate change and human hubris, urging us to look closer at the creatures who co-exist with us in the space between wild and tame.

Whether it's a salmon riding in the trough between waves, a cormorant flexing on a harbor buoy, a tourist on the ferry, or a toad on the ridge of a nebula somewhere in the Milky Way, we are prompted to ask, What is the wavelength of a soul? What new ways of being will emerge as our world changes? Will we embrace the bodies of the unknowable future?

With equal parts wonder and humor, Kellebrew calls our attention to the strangeness and beauty of nature and our place in it, inviting us to fall in love with this open book called living.

140 pages, Paperback

Published September 13, 2022

About the author

Liz Kellebrew lives in the Pacific Northwest and writes fiction, poetry, literary essays, and creative nonfiction. Liz won the Miracle Monocle Award for Innovative Writing and she was a finalist for the Calvino Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College.

Reviews

[Tim Kavi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Liz Kellebrew's "Water Signs" is like taking a breath of fresh air as you leave the urban landscapes behind, realizing it is salt air, and being hit on all sides in a 'tour de force' of all your senses in a fully lived-out reminder of all that is human, animal, and spirit all at once. It is an inner seeing of your own totem. And it is a beacon of hope, reminding us that Nature is there if we but look, and a ferry ride is a 'mahayana' to the next coastline that is not a line at all. It is an outer look too, a reminder that Nature is only a breath away whether we are in the city, the country, in our minds, or in our community. If we dare to look! It is calling us to a faraway home, while it is our very heart at the doorstep of its arrival. It is my own struggle for connection, and yet, finding it again and again. If we but wake up and sing among lilacs with a plywood guitar, everything new is there for us to wake up to and find joy upon our waking. I'm amazed, gobsmacked, and in quiet reverence all at the same time. Then comes along another one of her poems! Liz, thanks for sharing your very heart with the rest of us!