Poem of the Week | March 13, 2017

This week, we are excited to offer a new poem by Aimée Sands. Sands is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and the author of The Green-go Turn of Telling (Salmon Poetry 2012.) Poet Bruce Weigl praised this first collection of her poems, writing that “The elegant wedding of fresh intellect and lyric bravado distinguish Aimee Sands’ new poems from much of our recent American poetry.” Sands’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in FIELD, Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, Measure, Poetry Ireland, and other literary journals. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and has co-directed the Brookline Poetry Series in Brookline, Massachusetts since 2001. She is also the producer/director of the independent documentary “What Makes Me White?” and has won numerous awards, including an Emmy, for her television and radio productions. She teaches at Bentley University and leads the Word-Hoard Workshops, a series of poetry craft workshops and master classes.
 
Author’s note:

In this poem, I am trying to immerse myself simultaneously in the physical pleasures of the English language and the damp physicality of Chincoteague Island – a place where a house never belongs entirely to its inhabitants, but also to the spirits of this moody, marshy island. There is a navigational pull going on in the poem between the forces of linguistic play and the forces of tidal memory. “The Reptiles Have It” emerges as both an edgy love poem and an ode to the powers of drenching storms and rising seas.