Recensori in anteprimaHeather Sellers

From the frontlines of climate catastrophe, a poet watches the sea approach her doorstep.

Born and raised in Florida, Heather Sellers grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. The natural world provided a life-giving respite from domestic violence. She found, in the tropical flora and fauna, great beauty and meaningful connection. She made her way by trying to learn the name of every flower, every insect, every fish and shell and tree she encountered.

That world no longer exists.

In this collection of poems, Sellers laments its loss, while observing, over the course of a year, daily life of the people and other animals around her, on her street, and in her low-lying coastal town, where new high rises soar into the sky as the storm clouds gather with increasing intensity and the future of the community--and seemingly life as we know it--becomes more and more uncertain.

Sprung from her daily observation journals, haunted by ghosts from the past, Field Notes from the Flood Zone is a double love letter: to a beautiful and fragile landscape, and to the vulnerable young girl who grew up in that world. It is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.

Heather Sellers is face-blind--that is, she has prosopagnosia, a rare neurological condition that prevents her from reliably recognizing people's faces. Growing up, unaware of the reason for her perpetual confusion and anxiety, she took what cues she could from speech, hairstyle, and gait. But she sometimes kissed the wrong guys at parties, mistaking them for her boyfriend, or failed to recognize even her own father and mother. She feared she must be crazy. Yet it was her mother who nailed windows shut, squirreled food around the house, had Heather walk on her knees to preserve the carpet and practice secret code words to deploy in case of abduction. Her father, a dark and unpredictable presence, went on week-long "fishing trips" (a.k.a benders), took in drifters, wore pantyhose and bras under his regular clothes. Heather clung to a barely coherent story of a "normal" childhood in order to survive the one she had. That fairy-tale unravels decades later, when Heather takes the man she would marry home to meet her parents. Intending to show off her late-blooming normalcy, Heather is instead confronted with a past that reveals itself as infinitely more bizarre than she had allowed herself to remember. With courage, deepening insight, and unfailing humor, she's beginning to uncover the truth about her parents and herself. As she comes at last to trust her own perceptions, she learns the gift of perspective: that embracing the past as it is allows us to let it go. And she illuminates a deeper truth: that even in the most chaotic and heartbreaking of families, love may be seen and felt.