W.W. Norton & Company ~ Hardback, 2015 ~ Paperback, 2016

Hardback ISBN-10: 0393339661 / ISBN-13: 978-0393339666

Paperback ISBN-10: 0393353214 / ISBN-13: 978-0393353211

Available from Politics & Prose ~ Bookshop ~ Powell’s ~ Amazon ~ Barnes & Noble

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“Sandra Beasley is a master poet of facts, story, feeling, and the slipknot statement that binds them together. Inventive, ingeniously fitted, musical, precise, unfettered, her poems etch and mirror the clarities and strangeness of our human lives. This irresistibly visionary book resembles to no small degree a cabinet of wonders. To every phenomenon and circumstance of the heart, its poems open, saying, Yes, this too I know; this too we are. Then add, Now, let us see further.”

~ Jane Hirshfield

“When William H. Gass said truly sensual literature embraces ‘not the language of love, but the love of language…not what the tongue touches, but what it forms,’ he might as well have been describing Sandra Beasley’s Count the Waves. This new book casts the ebb and flow of love in ingenious forms, inflections, and contexts, but it also never shies from its desire to ‘name what you aim to warm with touch.’ Beasley’s virtuosity is rooted in heart. Edgy, beguiling, and wise: Count the Waves is a constant marvel.”

~Terrance Hayes

“Beasley uses humor and surprise like a scythe, cutting to the root of a matter.”

~Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post

“The poems are full of subtly arresting imagery, the kind that takes a beat to register…And they all reveal how deftly Beasley wields the final line. A poem’s close can tie it up or blow it apart—and Beasley almost always chooses an explosion, or at least a startling pivot. Her closing words shift speakers, realign priorities, reveal what’s at stake.”

~Camila Domonoske, Washington City Paper

“The poems here are vivid and energetic, fun and playful, strange and mysterious….One thinks of the realistic dreamscapes of Charles Simic, where we experience an alternate reality, or see our reality in startling ways.”

~Craig Beaven, Blackbird

• Hear “Ukulele,” featured on NPR’s Morning Edition
• Read “Inner Flamingo,” selected for The Rumpus National Poetry Month
• Read “Economy,” selected by the Academy of American Poets
• Read “Grief Puppet,” selected by the Academy of American Poets