Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is pleased to feature Lisa Sewell’s poem “Creating Space // 6.1 ft tide // Cascade Head” as our first monthly featured poem from a full-length book for Issue 9: Summer 2025. You can find more poetry in their book, Flood Plain now available from Grid Books.
Creating Space // 6.1 ft tide // Cascade Head
Heart beating strongly, the wind at thirty knots
whips rain against the punky, gray-to-black
cliff ledge, the smashed green and amber beer bottle glass
among the thrift and the sea pink. It rifles
the trapped Safeway bags and buffets
the red-tailed hawk who regarded me too briefly
as I tried to witness self, to witness breath, thumbs
pressed to my chest in anjali mudra, beginning
to see that no single person or agency is in charge of
combatting foreign election interference.
On almost any long car ride anywhere in North America
almost anyone will spot the hawk’s broad,
rounded wings and short, wide tail, his rufous belly
streaked with brown—the dark band of pulsation
between wrist and shoulder. I let my own arms dangle,
unclench my shoulder blades taking the fold
from the inside out and vibrate with the kee-eeeee-arr
screech as he telescopes to a wavy line and hovers—
there to receive what is there to be received,
as the fascia begins to tear and slowly open.
About the Poem
‘Creating Space // 6.1 ft tide // Cascade Head’ is from a sequence at the center of Flood Plain that grew out of a 3-month stay at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, an artist residency on the Oregon coast. The center is situated at the edge of an old growth rainforest and beside the Salmon River estuary and the cliffs of Cascade Head. During my time there I renewed my dormant yoga practice and tried to hike or walk somewhere different every day. I took notes as I walked, trying to connect with the plants and critters and other beings I encountered. Yoga, the walks, and the writing became a daily exercise in paying attention—to the world, to the bodies in the world around me and to my own body—and I hope that effort is reflected in the poems. The sequence is also a kind of faux crown of sonnets, where the final line of one poem is the first line of the next, so that the form also reflects the interconnectedness of the natural world.
Author Bio
Lisa Sewell is the author of The Way Out, Name Withheld, Impossible Object, and Birds of North America, an artist’s book collaboration with Susan Hagen and Nathalie Anderson. She has edited several essay collections for Wesleyan University Press that focus on twenty-first century North American poetry and poetics, including North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language, with Kazim Ali, and American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, with Claudia Rankine. She has received grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, and has held residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Tyrone Guthrie Center and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, among others. She teaches in the English Department at Villanova University and divides her time between Philadelphia and White Salmon, WA.
From Flood Plain
When water overflows a river’s banks, adjacent flood plains will respond with processes of absorption and dissipation. For the poet, such landscapes are models for damage control, a potential source of hope, and perhaps endurance, in an age of ongoing ecological disaster. In her stunning fifth collection, Flood Plain, Lisa Sewell finds fertile ground on which to examine the urgent questions of our age: What does it mean to live on a dying planet? How are we, as humans, meant to respond? And how, at last, can we grieve?
The poems of Flood Plain might be put forward as a type of evidence, data or samples carefully collected for study. But they are also much more than this—they are the poet’s own testimonies, first-hand records revealing, page after page, her powers of observation and witness. “The flood plain is a field again,” Sewell writes in “Restorative Justice,” a reminder that natural disasters take many forms. “The flowers will last until the first snow / of winter as everything conspires / to bury us in what we couldn’t see or imagine.” Indeed, poetry may be our flood plain: the site on which we absorb these truths, and the means to process the weight of it all.
Available at: Grid Books
Contents
Chapbook Poem: The Blessed Knot by Li-Young Lee
“A well-made poem is a knot, but not a tangle. The well-made knot of a poem can disentangle readers from illusion, to free them from confusion. Poetry is a form of disillusionment.” Read the July Chapbook Poem by Li-Young Lee along with words from the poet.
“This work is an archive of my attempts to become more familiar with who I am, and why I am here, to immerse myself in these ancient spiritual questions…” Check out five poems and five images by Laynie Browne along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Creating Space by Lisa Sewell
“Yoga, the walks, and the writing became a daily exercise in paying attention—to the world, to the bodies in the world around me and to my own body…” Read the Excerpt Poem of the Month for July 2025 by Lisa Sewell along with words from the poet.
“My poetry tries to examine … the difference between the lives we live inside ourselves and the lives we expose to other people.” Read five poems by William Doreski along with a few words from the poet.
July ’25: Poetry Readers Wanted
Read a note from editor Aiden Hunt about PCR’s Summer poetry and new poetry reader opportunities brought by our growing original poetry submissions.
Four Poems by allison whittenberg
“I grew up as a film buff and I loved reading Hollywood Babylon. Over the years, I have learned to separate the truth from the myths.” Read four poems by allison whittenberg along with a few words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: August Peaches by Winshen Liu
“I wanted to sit with a particular end-of-summer indulgence, where a host has saved specialty foods to welcome visiting friends and family–fancy chocolate, favorite sodas, a certain snack.” Read a poem from Winshen Liu’s chapbook Paper Money along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Cheesecake Factory by Max McDonough
“This poem lives in the weirdness of the suburban mall spaces a lot of us grew up visiting (or loitering in!), places that feel like they could be anywhere and nowhere at once.” Read a poem from Max McDonough’s chapbook along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Alexandra Meyer
“Love had made me stronger in a lot of ways, but also showed me the weakest parts of myself that were left crystallized for him to see. This was much like wood morphing into rock during the petrification process.” Read three poems by Alexandra Meyer along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Kristiane Weeks-Rogers
“Anchored by sensory detail, the poem journeys between childhood safety and adult experience in a canyon town shaped by rivers and monsoons. … This poem is a meditation on time, tastes, and tenderness of memory.” Read three poems by Kristiane Weeks-Rogers along with words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: The Seventh Age of Shakespeare’s Father by Scott LaMascus
“This poem hit me hard last winter, sitting a moment near my late father, as our family was trying to absorb the meaning of his ALS diagnosis … I wondered, if ‘all the world’s a stage,’ what role had I just been assigned?” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for September 2025 along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Landscape with footprints in ash by Selma Asotić
“When I want to sound smart, I say things like: a poet is one who leaves. When I accept that I’m not very smart, mostly just perplexed and a little scared, I write poems about ghosts and circle farms.” Read a poem from Asotić’s new book, Say Fire, along with words from the poet.
“All of my encounters with the U.S. healthcare system follow the protocols of the ridiculous. This poem, couched in the conventions of the contemporary sonnet, explores my latest, decisive encounter with a doctor’s office.” Read three poems by Robin Arble along with words from the poet.
September ’25: Best of the Net Nominations
Editor Aiden Hunt announces Philly Chapbook Review’s Best of the Net 2026 anthology nominations in this editor’s note and provides links to the nominated poems.
Verses of Mourning: in the aftermath by Jessica Nirvana Ram
“[Ram] presents a revealing and heartbreaking collection that asks the reader to think about what they remember the most about those they have lost.” Read Alex Carrigan’s full review.
“This poem reckons with our capitalist, product-driven society to ask people why disabled stories are only relevant if they portray the ‘other’ overcoming trauma to become abled people’s inspiration porn.” Read three poems by Makena Metz along with words from the poet.