Surfacing is about all the ways you can drown in your hometown, and what follows you even if you get out. With strong Pacific Northwest imagery, the search for redemption and peace are woven through explorations and confessions of mental illness, queerness, grief, family, gender roles, and self-destruction. “Surfacing opens with a lake that swallows children, a lake as ellipsis, as penumbra. Most children do not survive, but some do, the book’s speaker does but not easily. Perhaps it is this image, of the child on a school bus that plunges into a lake, that immediately transforms one’s thinking about teenagers, about oneself as a teenager. These poems are never sentimental, but they are gracious. The frequent use of couplets, for me, is a great tenderness, a coupling one’s child self requires to surface from out of the shadow of self and lineage. —J’Lyn Chapman Published by Free Lines Press. Cover art by Max Padma.