The Good Sea by Robert Fanning (presale)
The following chapbook is in presale and will ship by September 15th, 2026.
Product Details:
Copyright: Robert Fanning (Standard Copyright License)
Publisher: Red Flag Poetry
Published: September 2026
Language: English
Pages: 36
Binding: Saddle Stitch
Interior Ink: Black & white text
Dimensions (inches): 8.5x5.5
ISBN: 978-173781646-1
About The Good Sea:
A blind boy sees with the gift of a dead woman’s eyes, a man is carried away by owls, a child’s lost balloon lures their parent beyond time—these are just a few of the transformative dives you’ll take in Robert Fanning’s The Good Sea. Lush with Fanning’s musical language and deep vision, in this collection of twenty prose poems, wilder, dreamlike currents surge, washing over ruins left by change and loss with humor, soul, and the fathomless, redemptive force of the imagination.
Praise for The Good Sea:
The untitled prose poems in The Good Sea are as bold and imaginative as they are formally elegant. Robert Fanning is among our most inventive poets, and the stark transformations in this collection put me in mind of some of the best episodes in Ovid.
Fanning's speaker is a parent but also "a mouth of ashes... a song in smoke. "In his work a grieving man can become an egret, a child's story can become "a helix, a fluttering vine of tropical feathers." As in earlier books he writes poignantly about loss and grief, the redemptive possibilities in nature, but here there is a magical realm where the reader can lift off and metamorphose into something transcendent "as we sing in a language [none] of us has ever heard."
-Cal Freeman, author of The Weather of Our Names
In The Good Sea, Robert Fanning condenses the world into gemlike focus as the book's underlying themes-loss and its power to transform-are revealed like "Longing is unearthed by the throats of birds." Throughout this sequence of brilliant poems, there is an ocean that "licks the empty beach black" and lovers on the beach that sing souls to the shore in a language they've never heard. Fanning's mastery of this sublime imagery draws us into a journey of light and shadow, memory and silence: the "fallen feather, she's gathering for The collection begins with forest in the midst of
and ends with the good sea reclaiming what s lost "that will carry you home." Intense, spirited, filled with myth and mud and visceral life, The Good Sea embraces-with luminous clarity-each poem like a shell. Inside each shell is Robert Fanning's extraordinary gift: refined and loved; vulnerable and wise.
-Linda Nemec Foster, author of Bone Country and The Blue Divide
Robert Fanning catalogues loss. In these wonderfully evocative prose poems or pieces or fragments, he starts with a child's loss-the death of a pet; a midway balloon escaping-but soon moves to elegy, longing, memory, and the reconstructions of the imagination. Grief brings him to the things of this world, and they tremble in new light that comes from "that bright sea in you, forever roaring." By the end of this chapbook the Good Sea not only becomes sustaining, but it is also redemptive, for both the poet and his readers.
-Keith Taylor, author of What Can the Matter Be?
