Swim Poems, by Beth Winegarner

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Beth Winegarner’s Swim Poems is a collection of brief poems written in the afterglow of swimming in the chilly waters of San Francisco Bay. Each one is a tribute to noticing the ever-changing nature of place: sea-birds and other wildlife, currents and tides, fellow swimmers and the writer’s own temperaments.

Written over the course of a single year of regular swims, these poems also explore the unseen nature of water and its connection to ancestors and the dead. They question and reframe humans’ relationship to open water and remind us that humans are part of nature, including aquatic nature, and that access to clean waterways is crucial to our overall well-being.

Dive into these poems, wade slowly among them, or let them wash over you.

Beth Winegarner is an award-winning journalist, author, poet, essayist and pop culture critic who’s contributed to the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Guardian, and many others. She is the author of several books, most recently San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History, and she is the co-host of the Dead Reckoning podcast with Courtney Minick of Here Lies a Story. Her poems have appeared in Nonbinary Review, Recenter Press, Star*Line and Breath & Shadow.