The Geographer’s Wife

Bart Edelman’s latest poetry collection, The Geographer’s Wife, explores how our sense of environment creates and frames the world we choose to inhabit. The speakers in Edelman’s poems perpetually find themselves in conflict with the world around them. The choices they make sometimes free them to discover a life full of promise, sometimes cast them into uncertainty, and sometimes condemn them to regression. Again and again, the landscapes they visit serve as both boundary and horizon. This sense of place-east, west, north, and south-directs the physical and spiritual movements we often take for granted, as we pass through the days and nights that dictate each one of our journeys.