Sea Smoke, Spindrift and Other Spells

Shauna Potocky writes of living on the rugged coast of the northern Gulf of Alaska with the clarity of piercing cold and an illuminating light, caught most spectacularly by spindrift and sea smoke when the prevailing clouds part. She arrives as a migrant bird does but settles into the town of Seward, where she deciphers the deeper cycles of land and water that bring moments of upheaval and others of serenity. We feel the warmth of human, and sometimes canine, companionship... [through] skijoring, picking berries, bird counting, or pulling up a seat to the captain's table. In this collection, we feel the immediacy of existence, the persistence of history, and the connections that are eternal in a spare, loving language.

-Sandra Wassilie, author of The Dream That Is Childhood: A Memoir in Verse

Shauna Potocky echoes Henry David Thoreau's August 5, 1851 journal entry: "The question is not what you look at, but what you see." She encapsulates Thoreau's concern in one particular poem, "All The Things We Miss Because We Did Not Look," and evokes all the senses throughout this collection. Her poetry blends, merges and mixes land and seascapes, history, wildlife, mountains and glaciers. The specific and personal conjure up the intangible and universal forming a unity that transcends Alaska...

-Doug Capra, author of The Spaces Between: Stories from the Kenai Mountains to the Kenai Fjords, and The Last Homesteaders