We’re all at sea these days, no matter where we live. We make impossible pacts to guard against drowning, cobble together precarious rafts, patch our bailing buckets, and still the water pours in; we cannot hope to escape it.  Job loss, heartbreak, accident, cruelty, impotence, climate change, madness, death: every sort of weather conspires to keep us lost and insomniac, struggling to reach some sort of shore.

What We’re Doing To Stay Afloat chronicles such watery conditions and offers poetry as one sort of kit containing tools fitted to the task of staying alive: humour, rage, hammer, buoy, radar, chart.  Here, melancholia and surrealism interleave, monologues become dialogues, want ads and Facebook posts are recycled into intimate domestic conversations, and ballads of human desperation alternate with accounts of the silliness, grace and violence of the natural world. Poetry alone won’t save us of course, but in flashes it here reveals where we are; it names, navigates, and gives us light to row by, perhaps long enough to sight an approach to the next harbour.

Karin Cope divides her time between Nova Scotia and British Columbia. She is a poet, sailor, photographer, writer, activist, blogger and Associate Professor at NSCAD University. Her publications include Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein, and, since 2009, a photo/poetry blog entitled Visible Poetry: Aesthetic Acts in Progress.

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