Hithe

Hithe is the debut poetry collection of Jennifer Spector. An expatriate in Panama, her writing is the distillation of decades spent intimately attentive to her environment, to the lush verdancy of that narrow isthmus between the Atlantic and Pacific. These are poems that enfold narratives of passage, guided by unusual waymarks — from half-timbered, banked canoes to the freight of the hollows, and what carries across shifting languages and bodies untethered from ground.

‘With a naturalist’s precision, she records her studies in arresting, stunning song.’ (Martine Bellen)

‘Everything is powerful and vibrant in these pages. A remarkable book.’ (Gerry Loose)

 

Hithe presents dioramas of the traversed natural and imagined worlds, where locality is rerouted, moving inwardly over a sketch of elusive lines — a lean-to by a river, a thatched roundhouse, a coracle willowed in the interval, a body losing hem as it becomes the boat. Poised at this place of edges, Spector’s writing treads the line between motion and fixity, ever circling the question of what it means to be a long time away from ‘home’.