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Award-winning poet Enid Shomer’s new and selected poems explore family, nature, and the many facets of womanhood, from youthful desire to life’s later stages.
In Riptide, Shomer’s poems, written over the last forty years, illuminate the nature of being—whether human or kudzu—“this / headlong rush, this stammer / of green, this slow / stampede toward light.” Elegant lyrics, anchored in her beloved Florida landscape, use stunning imagery to convey Shomer’s rapturous engagement with the natural world. Longer sequences showcase narrative and formal dexterity while deftly bringing historical personae to life in poems such as “Pope Joan.” New poems powerfully examine mortality and sensuality as experienced in an aging body.
With lush music and deeply spiritual attention, Shomer’s work transforms the mundane into the numinous. Now in her early eighties, Shomer is still at the top of her form.
Enid Shomer is the author of six books of poetry and three of fiction. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Boulevard, Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, etc. Among her awards are two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, three fellowships from the State of Florida, the Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry, the Lexi Rudnitsky Award from Persea Books for Shoreless, the Washington Prize for Stalking the Florida Panther, the Iowa Fiction Prize for Imaginary Men, and the Gold Medal in Fiction for Tourist Season. NPR named The Twelve Rooms of the Nile one of the six best novels of the year. Shomer has taught as Visiting Writer at Florida State University, the Ohio State University among others. For many years she edited the Poetry Series for the University of Arkansas Press. In 2013, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council. She lives in Tampa.
