Poetry. Inhabited by spirits, shadows, and ghosts harmonizing from the bleak and muddy bottoms of The Lake--the One and Only Lake--Blueberry Elizabeth Morningsnow's debut collection of poems, WHALE IN THE WOODS, is a landscape of wild-hearted voices calling to us through passions so profound only Whitman has ever evoked them. Resolved, at first, to a ruined and dissolving world, these poems expand and reawaken the sounds of a mythmaking chorus. "A lake is born," we learn, "composed entirely of warm human eyes" and "a child / is born with eyes that only see when he closes him / A dark lake writes a poem / about lakes. It's different than / any other poem about lakes." WHALE IN THE WOODS is brazen, sorrowful, ecstatic, and astonished, and Morningsnow a voice like no other in contemporary poetry. Winner of Rescue Press's 2011 Black Box Poetry Prize, selected by Sabrina Orah Mark.

"Here is a study of a world where God is a fossil, and the woods is a fossil, and the father is a fossil, and the lake is a fossil, and the sun is a fossil, and the poet is a fossil, and being alive is a fossil, and being dead is a fossil, and day is a fossil, and hello is a fossil, and goodbye is a fossil. Morningsnow digs so gorgeously. Her kindness is a gigantic mercy. She will trace you back."--Sabrina Orah Mark