[10/27/26] Chapman, Elizabeth: Our Long Float

White Pine Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 27, 2026

Publisher Marketing:

"Our Long Float is a luminous meditation on what it means to live--and grieve--in relation to the living, the lost, and the land. From the elephants of Botswana to the trout streams of Montana, Chapman moves through landscapes both physical and emotional, listening closely to what memory, silence, and connection reveal. Grounded in the spirit of ubuntu-- am because you are--these poems honor presence and impermanence, weaving elegy, ecology, and love into a body of work that feels at once deeply intimate and profoundly expansive."-- Hélène Cardona

"Elizabeth...writes with vigor and soul--her luminous poems shine like beacons."-- Naomi Shihab Nye

"What a lovely image with its powerful metaphors of light and death, life and living illuminations all inseparable, and the brevity and cruelty and rush of the moment in it. The strain of memory, grief, recurring light plays all through the poems."-- W S Merwin

"This is a book of the impossible--finding a fiercely consoling song not in spite of this mortal coil but because of it. Nimble, vivid and fully inhabited, Elizabeth Chapman's poems are personal in the truest sense: accessible to our own deepest feelings."-- Dean Young