Of Sea

A remarkable new book in praise of marine fauna.

Of Sea takes the form of a poetic bestiary of creatures living beneath, beside and above the water: in wetlands, salt marshes and the intertidal zone. In a sequence of 46 poems, Burnett captures the world of cockles and clams, rare moths and the humble earwig (to name a few) with a precise and dynamic lyric that seems always on the verge of music.

‘Burnett is one of the UK’s most original poets of the nonhuman world, and of our environmental moment. Innovative, dazzling, affecting poems that shimmer with intellectual acuity and emotional resonance.‘
- Rebecca Tamas

Author Biography

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a poet and academic with a focus on innovative poetics. She holds a BA in English from Oxford, an MA and PhD in Contemporary Poetics from Royal Holloway, University of London, and studied performance at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York and Naropa. Her work has been anthologised in Dear World and Everyone In It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2013) and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK (Reality Street, 2015). Her debut poetry collection Swims was published to great acclaim by Penned in the Margins in 2017 and her next collection Of Sea is coming in May 2021. Her nonfiction exploration of memory and natural history, The Grassling, was published in 2019 by Allen Lane. She curates ecopoetics exhibitions and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Newman University in Birmingham.