Praise for Surf-Body

Surf-Body is a book that is, like the ocean herself, both deeply familiar and wholly new. In these poems the sea and her birds are given the attention we should have been giving them all along. Every bufflehead’s feather, slice of sun, and green wave in here made my heart ache with its beauty.

— Katie Rice, author of Sea Change

With lean lines nevertheless rich with textural detail, Dean Schabner’s Surf-Body keeps the water close.  What shifts is the point of view: the poems’ lenses follow the sightlines of father, lover, and, most strikingly, the birds of sea and estuary. Even where the subject ranges as far as St. Petersburg and a sudden storm, the tint of returning sunlight on trees connects the near to far, the city to the natural world that anchors this work. Schabner’s poems are light and quick in their phrasing, full of darting images as swift as the blue heron’s “arrowbeak,” balanced by clear-eyed and meditative reflection.

— Holly M. Wendt