Upriver

“What excites me about Carolyn Kremers’ Upriver: Just when you think you know where a particular poem has parachuted you into the vast terrain we call Alaska, everything shifts: foreground, background, attitude, mood, generation, gender, language and custom, a vast landscape and history deeply violated, deeply loved. Alaska herself—a sometimes cruel, everdemanding shape-shifting region—feeds, inhabits and haunts these pages. . . . This beautiful book—snow-packed, melting, thick with time, spiritualized with dashes of rhyme and dollops of dance and prayer—reads like a lyric break-through memoir of open and often discomforting discovery and brave self revelation.” Al Young, former poet laureate of California and author of Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons

A few writers are fortunate enough to discover a place that nurtures them and gives their work depth and meaning. . . . A smaller number seem to be able to capture the very spirit of a place. Carolyn Kremers is one of those rare writers and her place is Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and its people and to a lesser extent Fairbanks where she now lives. Somehow she has crossed the gulf that often separates people from people, language from language, culture from culture. This book is a roadmap to the heart of Alaska by a writer who has earned our attention. Tom Sexton, former poet laureate of Alaska and author of I Think Again of Those Ancient Chinese Poets

How seemingly simple are the poems in Upriver, yet how profound; how dreamlike, yet how charged with reality, immediately and firmly grounded in the earth and human experience. The themes of this poetry are basic and multifaceted, the voice rich and resonant. I thank Carolyn Kremers for bringing this world, her world, in this way, in these words, to all of us. Pattiann Rogers, author of Wayfare

Finalist, Poetry WILLA Literary Award