Eleanor Stanford (Cape Verde 1998-2000) Publishes Poetry Collection

Eleanor Stanford (Cape Verde 1998-2000) new book of poems, Bartram’s Garden, has just released from Carnegie Mellon University Press. The collection of poems takes the reader from Brazil’s Bay of All Saints to Philadelphia, from Florida’s brutal humidity to the drought-scorched Cape Verde Islands.

Bartram’s Garden takes in the pulse and ache of the natural world: the bittern balanced in the swamp, cashew fruit’s astringent flesh. Passionflower, rattlesnake, feather-tongued hibiscus. With a gardener’s eye for color and motif, and a mother’s open-hearted sensibility, these poems explore vivid landscapes both intimate and foreign.

Of this new collection, poet Moira Egan has written, “These poems sing gorgeously ‘with their glowing throats / and feathered tongues.'”

Eleanor is the author of another poetry collection, The Book of Sleep (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008) and her Peace Corps memoir, História, História: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, 2013).

She is a Fulbright fellow now in Brazil where she is researching and writing about traditional midwifery. Otherwise, she lives in the Philadelphia area with her husband and three sons.

There will be a reading and book party at Philadelphia’s Bartram’s Garden, Saturday April 18 at 4 pm.