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“Within Riptide surge currents of ferocity and tenderness. Intimate details in Enid Shomer’s poems have always illuminated larger historical exigencies and social realities. Across her books, we see love and tragedy in family life; shrewd depictions of American places; the joyful body before inevitable decline. These narratives, composed with lush metaphor and pitch-perfect tone, resonate with music and wisdom. Shomer’s biographical poems about aviator Jacqueline Cochran offer a master class in documentary poetics. Among the new poems, the ten-sonnet sequence titled ‘Medical Arts’ delivers a clear-eyed picture of our technology-driven lives. This is a book to savor.”—Robin Becker, author of Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems
“Enid Shomer’s Riptide is a major achievement, brimming with love and pain and that rare poetic virtue: plain wisdom. ‘I weep for all that’s lost and still it pours,’ she writes in one of the book’s beautiful new poems: ‘That’s what the rain is for.’ Read this great gathering to feel the sweep and force of a life’s work, and to hear one of our most soulful writers at her very best.”—Patrick Phillips, author of Elegy for a Broken Machine and Song of the Closing Doors
“Florida, nay, all the wet and dry states, applaud! Enid Shomer’s Riptide: New and Selected Poems pulls you into the deepest Atlantic waters, decade by decade, with her steady brilliance. So many award-winning poems, from the lovely sonnets like ‘Shoreless’ to the impressive long poems, ‘Pope Joan’ and ‘Women of Herculaneum,’ to the book-long Stars at Noon, on the woman who broke the sound barrier. Shomer even walks ‘dogly’ through medical nightmares to tell us that ‘pain is the ribbon tied around pleasure.’ Highly recommended.”—Terese Svoboda, author of Theatrix: Poetry Plays
“In one of the new poems gathered here, the speaker observes a series of commonplace items in a museum and notices that ‘There’s something holy about these objects now / that remembrance has conferred its grace.’ This has always been Enid Shomer’s gift. Her voluptuous, unflinching, formally dexterous poems apply a vividness and clarity of attention that sets each subject on its pedestal.”—George David Clark, author of Newly Not Eternal
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.
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Enid Shomer is also the editor of All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women.
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.
