Our Long Float
AUTHOR
Elizabeth Chapman
Our Long Float is a luminous meditation on what it means to live — and grieve — in relation to the living, the lost, and the land.
From the elephants of Botswana to the trout streams of Montana, Chapman moves through landscapes both physical and emotional, listening closely to what memory, silence, and connection reveal. Grounded in the spirit of ubuntu — I am because you are — these poems honor presence and impermanence, weaving elegy, ecology, and love into a body of work that feels at once deeply intimate and profoundly expansive.
Reviews
“Our Long Floatis a luminous meditation on what it means to live — and grieve — in relation to the living, the lost, and the land. From the elephants of Botswana to the trout streams of Montana, Elizabeth Chapman moves through landscapes both physical and emotional, listening closely to what memory, silence, and connection reveal. Grounded in the spirit of ubuntu — I am because you are — these poems honor presence and impermanence, weaving elegy, ecology, and love into a body of work that feels at once deeply intimate and profoundly expansive. With grace, wit, and reverence, Our Long Float offers readers a quiet, radiant map of how to be here — with one another — even as the current carries us onward.”
— Hélène Cardona
“Acts of care, of generosity and repair, are central to the poems in Our Long Float. Guardian elephants who breathe kindness, a plant to bandage bleeding, hidden love notes found after the lover has died, friends who keep her head above sorrow’s water: these and many more appear as the poet shares the exhilarations of love, the keenness of loss, and her profound appreciation for the many gifts the world offers to those who pay attention. These are beautiful poems. You will be glad you read them.”
—Christine Holland, author of Family Stories
Elizabeth Chapman's poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Santa Clara Review, Water-Stone Review, Poet Lore, Blueline, and Rattle. Her chapbook, Creekwalker, was published by (M)other Tongue Press (1995). She has seen two full-length collections into print: Candlefish (University of Arkansas Press, 2004) and Light Thickens (Ashland Poetry Press, 2009). The latter was awarded the Robert McGovern Prize. In 2020, The Orchard Street Press published her chapbook, Midnight Exhibition at the Wheatgrass Saloon.