Book Review

SOFAR is an acronym for the Sound Fixing and Ranging layers of ocean waters, where sounds—like those made by ocean life—bounce and travel for thousands of miles. It is a changeable, roomy channel for communication. Given the depth and mutability of the literal SOFAR channel, it often carries what seem to be simple sounds, like the low-frequency calls of whales. It is up to the listeners to be attentive and to think about what isn’t expressed, whether we’re listening to sounds originating above or below the waterline. Elizabeth Bradfield’s expansive poetry collection SOFAR teems with the panoply of life on Earth. Bradfield conducts a musical interplay of diversity and unity with scientific and poetic precision, creating a thriving catalog of poems spreading good news: Attentiveness to each other and to the “more than human” world offers relief from fascist insistence on bland uniformity.

“Shadow (Carcharodon carcharias),” is an elegant poem that attends to both human and more than human existence. In alternating stanzas, it pairs an homage to a great white shark’s senses, which are “vaster / and older” than human senses with an encounter, on Bradfield’s wedding night, with a spirit presenting as a “[t]hrum of ire.” For the shark, “the skin-holding sea flickers, / surges with light, scent, the pulsed charges of / bird-heart, cod-heart, seal-heart.” The human speaker—Bradfield on her wedding night—has more truncated perceptions, in part because she refuses them from fear: “instinctive, hardened into a shield, every / part of me no.” The difference between speaker and shark resolves with acceptance that the shark is more than “anything this body or the gray folds / of my human mind, fired by strange sparks, can know.”

The rich complexity of Bradfield’s adult life—poet, naturalist, sailor, lesbian—is multiplied by the added dimensions of menopause, which can be “winter and summer at once” and a new subject for attention. In poems focused on her long-term relationship, we find a naturalist’s observations and a poet’s confirmation of the gorgeous paradox created when individuality and unity connect, with neither subsuming the other. Menopause is the icing on the cake, as the poem “Fulcrum” celebrates

. . . what if

this gift has no sorrow wrapping it? What then do we know

of the world? I’ve been faithful to you for nearly thirty

years and now my body’s becoming a new weather.

Moments of intense joy come from such attentiveness. But moments of stunning grief come from attentiveness as well, and in some poems, attentiveness brings both joy and grief. As Bradfield remarked in a recent conversation, “I love the word attention. It holds tension. It holds being attendant and tending something and being tender.”

“Dispatch from this Summer,” with its hermit crab form, holds joy and grief in tension. The crab inserts its soft, vulnerable body into a discarded shell; in the form, one narrative is home for the other without a comparison giving one story ascendancy. The home narrative concerns the decimations of trees by invasive gypsy moths’ “unrelenting mastication” in a nearby forest. On a narrow path to a round pond that will hold your body exquisitely, “whoever you are,” the naturalist notes that taking the journey to be held means traveling back through the rain of “a constant heavy frass” and “apocalyptic trees.” The body held by this home narrative is a host of vulnerable bodies: the “Florida dancers,” who were killed in the 2016 mass murder at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, and the dozens more who were injured. The round pond offers a space open to the sky, untouched by shitstorms of moths and anti-queer violence.

SOFAR is a queer book in part because we humans live in a queer world, in part because Bradfield makes it so with her iconoclastic lesbian perspective, her deep observations of how nature refuses heteronormativity, and her insistence on speaking to and about oppressive forces within the poems and in her life outside of them. She currently appends each of her social media posts with the message “This is a queer post . . . ,” in response to Meta’s rubber-stamping of homophobic, transphobic, and anti-immigrant content on its platform. Her book represents the current literary conversation connecting human queerness and queerness in the non-human world. The poems are not in any way didactic—these are very much show-don’t-tell poems—but taken together, the poems make a cohesive argument. The naturalist offers attentiveness and sees, hears, touches, smells, and tastes diversity everywhere. To deny the fact of diversity in the “more than human” world would be as nonsensical as making a forest be a single shade of green. And we humans are not single, not separate from the world around us no matter how we may diverge; our distinct characteristics and desires are part of the larger ecosystem of multifaceted and intertwined life. The poems in SOFAR communicate this with both scientific and poetic precision.