SWIMMING IN GILEAD is now available for pre-order!

​In Swimming in Gilead, Steele weaves together poems of solace and hope. She offers you an incantation for survival and invites you to take a look within. Her poetry is like yoga: It will make you stretch and breathe towards a better version of yourself. Like her trees that “reach” and “learn as they teach,” these poems set at your feet a set of affirmations and mantras that guide you into calmness and peace. They provide a needed balm in these times of our modern-day Gilead, where women’s rights are being stripped away. These poems exhort you to live, live, live and fight, fight, fight. Simultaneously steeped in nature and our modern post-COVID world, the soul-affirming poems in this collection will center you.
 
-Jennifer Bartell Boykin, Author of Traveling Mercies and Poet Laureate of Columbia, SC
This book breaks the glass like a current, urgent version of Anne Sexton’s Transformations.

​Cassie Premo Steele offers powerful affirmations of both self and connection in these poems, each page brimming with the clarifying forces of anger and wisdom and love. An inspiring, galvanizing collection.
 
- Gayle Brandeis, Author of Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss
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​Rooted in the cyclical patterns of the natural world, these poems journey with the reader through the aging flesh of a woman, her landscape, her rage, and her abiding love for self, others, and the planet--in spite of, or because of--their inevitable shifting to something still unseen.
 
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- Laraine Herring, Author of A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens
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​Written from the depths of the pandemic, Cassie Premo Steele’s poems in Swimming in Gilead are insistent reminders from the past and messages of determined hope for the future. They are both fierce and tender, plainspoken and philosophical. I love how searching they are, and how they lead us to our own answers. 
 
-Caroline Grant, Co-director, Sustainable Arts Foundation
Swimming in Gilead is a vulnerable guide to staying attentive and resilient in a world where callousness has become currency for those in power. During a time when women’s rights have been stripped away, the natural world is devalued, and community connections are becoming increasingly fragile, Cassie Premo Steele directs us to slow down and contemplate gorgeous, mundane moments of love, everyday rituals enacted with clarity and intention that might teach us how to better live on this Earth. She reminds us, “All I have to do is / to pay close attention / to this life of mine.”
 
- Evelyn Berry, Author of Grief Slut
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​Copyright 2023 Cassie Premo Steele