The Sailing Place, by Kelly R. Samuels

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Burdened by the interior space, requisite tasks, and a stubborn despair, the woman in The Sailing Place craves release.

In short, lyrical poems, Samuels has the speaker share what she has become all too familiar with: tedious conversations about wallpaper, spilled tea, an untidy desk. Underlying this mundanity is a menace, some felt threat that can only be excised, or briefly forgotten, by removing herself to the natural world.

Mucking in the garden, a walk along a shore or a tramp up a coulee road, delicate alyssum—these offer her a reprieve and joy, a place where “the sharp snap of canvas takes.”

Kelly R. Samuels is the author of two poetry collections and four chapbooks—the most recent Oblivescence, a finalist for the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award (Red Sweater Press, 2024), and Talking to Alice (Whittle Micro-Press, 2023.) She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, River Styx, Sixth Finch, Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, and RHINO. She lives in the Upper Midwest.