This book collects over four decades of work by this unique and imaginative poet. Wronsky's poems, informed by her reading of classical texts as well as contemporary poetics, explore feminism, environmentalism, and mortality in language that is both multi-layered and musical. At times dark and at times humorous, her poems speak to our strengths as well as our frailties.

Poetry, Paperback, 150 pages, 6 x 9 in
ISBN-13 978-1945680458

Sample Poems

Praise for Under the Capsized Boat We Fly

“Gail Wronsky is an astonishing poet whose work I’ve turned to for more than twenty-five years to find the most deeply compassionate, artistically complex and intellectually astute poetry being written in this country. She is a literary revisionist of the most exquisite order, reconstructing the poetic canon, challenging the historical conventions of poetry and striking urgent, lyric chords of female empowerment. A breathtaking stylist—at times philosophical and meditative, at times powerfully gestural and painterly—Gail Wronsky is a poet of lasting beauty and relentless invention. With this book she takes her rightful place among the most celebrated of American poets.” —David St. John

“A master of the lyric, a visionary never far from the complicated, wondrous relations between world and imagination, body and mind, Gail Wronsky is one of our most indispensable poets. Her Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New and Selected Poems brings together a body of work that is at once fierce, sensual and startling: ‘I lie like a sunbeam/amazed/at the edge of the page.’ The scale, the point of view Wronsky inhabits—part oracle, part brilliant best friend—is unlike any poetry I know. Anarchy, domesticity, death, love, and the delicate, almost unnoticed invisibilities of the quotidian reign, never far from revolution. An epigrammatic wisdom arrives by often standing on its head: an uncanny truth that is so second-guessed and interrogated  one can’t help but trust in Muriel Ruykeyser’s prediction: ‘If a woman said the truth about her life, the world would split open.’ At last, as Etta James would sing it. As spiky and uncompromising as the work of Leonara Carrington, these poems carry a rare, mystical alchemy. And as Wronsky writes, ‘I am the woman filming it.’” —Gillian Conoley

“Gail Wronsky’s Under the Capsized Boat We Fly, New and Selected Poems begins by introducing the poems’ speaker as ‘an almost live and frightened woman.’ It is thus that the reader knows s/he will travel delightedly and feverishly off-balance, on a switchblade’s edge, feeling ‘as perishable as yesterday,’ seduced by a symphony in seven movements through time. Read this book slowly. You’ll be richly rewarded if you’re attentive to ‘its scars wound with jasmine.’” —Lynne Thompson