Shoreline Devotional

Shoreline Devotional contains motifs of sun, earth, and unbridled nature in poems about growing up and living in Southeast Texas; poems about vulnerable female bodies, decades of accumulated grief after deaths and hurricanes and pandemics, and the conflicts at the base of human existence and experience — the longing for religion and also its insufficiencies, the "seasoned hymn of the gulf" crashing upon its littered and polluted beaches, greed next to love, paradise next to hell, and the miracles of music alongside the enshrined skulls of ancestors.

Casey L. Ford walks around looking for ways to seem weightless in a body too big for the world. Born in a very good year at St. Mary's Hospital in Port Arthur, she spends much of her free time on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast– a good place for making complicated art. Ford recently earned the MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University and her first Pushcart Prize nomination from Last Stanza Poetry Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Delta Poetry Review, Ocotillo Review, Concho River Review, Texas Poetry Assignment, and Amarillo Bay, among other places. She is Assistant Director for Faculty Success in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.

TOC: I. if I think what’ s left is love 1 Unreliable Narrator 2 A Six-Year-Old Reads Sandburg in Highlights 3 Merfolk 4 The Man Who Remembered Birthdays 5 Six Movements of My Spine 6 Little Dancer Aged Fourteen 7 Country Crystal 8 Easter Morning, 1978 9 Self-portrait at Twenty 10 II. it tastes like dirt 11 Advance Directive 12 Stabat Mater 13 Poem in Which I Do Not Mourn Your Daughter Who Died Beside You in the Crash 14 An itch, a burn, a speck of blood 16 Self-portrait at Thirty Totem 17 Dusting 20 Eating Her Vegetables 21 Feeding the Monster 22 Loving the Dead 23 A Rhetorical Point 24 III. if this were hell, we could live here 25 Jefferson County Line 26 The Water Oak 28 Elegy after Ixtoc I 29 Upon Waking to a Dysfunctional Air Conditioner and 100% Relative Humidity 30 Leviathan 31 Offices of the Wraparound Porch 33 if there’ s anywhere, i believe it’ s here 35 Elegy for a Thousand Books Drowned in Floodwater 36 A Modern Vestibule 38 Self-Healing Infrastructure in a State Ill-Prepared to Freeze: A Love Letter 39 IV. let my throat / be busier with song 40 Second Date: Café with Small Chairs 41 Geometria 42 Mouthing: Ars Poetica 43 Fork 44 Heavy Equipment 45 What Hands Do 46 Teatime Liturgy 47 It’ s not the blues, it’ s the pitch-black 49 Sonnet from a Counselor’ s Office 50 Pomegranate 51 Float 52 Modulus of Resilience 53 Supermodel 54 Letter to My Full-Length Mirror 55 V. what happens to a heart that lives a hundred years 56 Self-portrait at Forty 57 Shoreline Devotional 58 Sonnenizio: Pandemic and Kalanchoe Leaf Study 59 Swim Away 60 Durga Entombed at the Menil Collection 61 Imitation and Ascent 62 Rhapsody on a Split in the San Marcos River 63 Postmortem 65 After Klee, Ancient Sound 66 Some Future Way of Walking 67

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Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

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