Swimming in Gilead
Swimming in Gilead
Swimming in Gilead by Cassie Premo Steele is now available as a paperback or PDF (you can preorder multiple copies at a discount here). This poetry chapbook takes us through the journey of a woman who, empowered to express herself through the feminist spirit of a writing group, explores what it means to be a woman and an ally in an era of uncertainty.
In the summer of 2020 as the pandemic was raging, Cassie joined a group of six women—three from Canada and three from the United States, four white and two women of color, and five lesbians and one straight—to sit and write remotely once a week. They called themselves the Sisters of Gilead, strangers who came together during the loneliness and terror of the pandemic and in the process, helped each other survive. And they helped each other write.
Cassie is a lesbian ecofeminist poet and novelist who lives in South Carolina with her wife. Her collection of poetry is her call to action, an invitation to each of us to examine what is within, and how, with the support of feminist advocates as friends, we can make something beautiful out of our “torn parts.” The poems within Swimming in Gilead were written under the loving kindness and acceptance of the Sisters of Gilead. By opening into vulnerability, the poems show readers how to “swim in Gilead” with hope and perseverance even as our rights as women are being ripped away.
You can learn more about Cassie in a conversation between the author and Melissa Nunez, Yellow Arrow interviewer.
yellowarrowpublishing.com/news/cassie-premo-steele-swimming-in-gilead-interview
Cover photograph by Sofia Tata (sofiatata.com); cover design by Alexa Laharty.
Thank you for supporting independent publishing.
Reviews:
“[Swimming in Gilead] breaks the glass like a current, urgent version of Anne Sexton’s Transformations. Cassie Premo Steele offers powerful affirmations of both self and connection in these poems, each page brimming with the clarifying forces of anger and wisdom and love. An inspiring, galvanizing collection.”
--Gayle Brandeis, author of Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss
“In Swimming in Gilead, [Cassie Premo] Steele weaves together poems of solace and hope. She offers you an incantation for survival and invites you to take a look within. Her poetry is like yoga: It will make you stretch and breathe toward a better version of yourself. Like her trees that ‘reach’ and ‘learn as they teach,’ these poems set at your feet a set of affirmations and mantras that guide you into calmness and peace. They provide a needed balm in these times of our modern day Gilead, where women’s rights are being stripped away. These poems exhort you to live, live, live and fight, fight, fight. Simultaneously steeped in nature and our modern post-COVID world, the soul-affirming poems in this collection will center you.”
--Jennifer Bartell Boykin, author of Traveling Mercy and Poet Laureate of the city of Columbia
“Written from the depths of the pandemic, Cassie Premo Steele’s poems in Swimming in Gilead are insistent reminders from the past and messages of determined hope for the future. They are both fierce and tender, plainspoken and philosophical. I love how searching they are, and how they lead us to our own answers.”
--Caroline Grant, codirector of Sustainable Arts Foundation
“Swimming in Gilead is a vulnerable guide to staying attentive and resilient in a world where callousness has become currency for those in power. During a time when women’s rights have been stripped away, the natural world is devalued, and community connections are becoming increasingly fragile, Cassie Premo Steele directs us to slow down and contemplate gorgeous, mundane moments of love, everyday rituals enacted with clarity and intention that might teach us how to better live on this Earth. She reminds us, ‘. . . all I have to do is / to pay close attention / to this life of mine.’”
--Evelyn Berry, author of GRIEF SLUT
“Rooted in the cyclical patterns of the natural world, these poems [in Swimming in Gilead by Cassie Premo Steele] journey with the reader through the aging flesh of a woman, her landscape, her rage, and her abiding love for self, others, and the planet—in spite of, or because of—their inevitable shifting to something still unseen.”
--Laraine Herring, author of A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens