Two Crossings, by Steve Mentz

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. These poems trace two saltwater crossings. In the first a family sails from Brooklyn to Southampton on board the Queen Mary 2. The second features a group of swimmers crossing from Port Jefferson, NY, to Bridgeport, CT. The five thousand nautical miles between North America and Europe unfurl a changing relationship between self and sea, as the ocean liner arcs across the top of the Atlantic. Textures of whitecaps and human memories jostle with the strange community called into being by the massive ship. Swimming fifteen statute miles across Long Island Sound from New York to Connecticut transforms a poet’s body into an instrument of connection to saltwater. Being in the middle of the Sound, in deep water far from shore, creates a fluid world of immersion, sensory deprivation, and more-than-human connection. A final poetic coda considers the most famous interrupted journey of a Cunard Liner across the sea, in which the Titanic did not make it all the way back from Southampton to New York in April 1912. Steve Mentz is a poet, writer, and open-water swimmer based on the Connecticut Shoreline. His most recently poetry collections include the book Sailing without Ahab (Fordham University Press 2024) and the chapbook Swim Poems (Ghostbird 2022). His poems have appeared in the Watchung Review, Belfield Literary Review, Blood & Bourbon, Grand Little Things, Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Glasgow Review of Books, and Underwater New York. He has published essays in Public Books, Arcade, Springs, Psyche, Correspondences, and elsewhere. He has also published numerous academic books, most recently An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2023) and the collection of essays, A Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Era (2021). He teaches at St. John’s University in Queens.