Same Boat
poems by Constance Norgren
About the Book | About the Author | Excerpts & Audio
About Same Boat
With flashes of emotion and glowing details, Constance Norgren’s poems reveal the hidden life of city streets and mountain streams, of people gathered at parties, in subway cars, at home. Norgren keeps asking, “Did you see what I just saw?”—showing us patches of common ground beneath our feet.
“Constance Norgren’s work is unflinching in its insistence on beauty in the everyday and that someone somewhere is responsible for atrocity, for punching a hole in a dying man’s water bottle. These poems tally the toll taken by the wars within and outside of us…
“These are poems of a refined intentional intelligence ablaze as it examines the worlds we all inhabit. Same Boat is a fine, fine book.”
—Sapphire
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About the Author
Constance Norgren co-authored the book To Genesis with Lois Adams, Barbara Elovic, and Patricia Markert, published by 5 Spice Press. Her poems have appeared in Yankee, West Branch, and Heliotrope, as well as in other journals. She lives in Brooklyn.
Excerpts & Audio
Postcard
At the brook today
the crickets striking their contented tones
over the bee’s hum,
sun pouring over every leaf and branch,
every rock and hard-baked path,
every telephone pole (warm creosote smell),
every spun soar of wire carrying stories,
some true.
I can hear the biggest boulders not speaking,
and on the shore
pebbles quiet as mice -
no, quieter.
What is it they are not saying?Under the shallow water
shatters of sun,
fish flicker, stone-shift,
red-orange here and gone of a salamander,
sway of that dark moss back and forth.
In shimmer, dapple, lives go unnoticed.Constance Norgren
Listen to Constance Norgren reading "Postcard":