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The online edition is available as a free PDF for reading. Best viewed on desktop or tablet in two-page spread view.
Tidal Language PDF (370MB)
The photography and text work together across pages. If the PDF opens one page at a time, please use your PDF reader’s two-page or facing-page view.
Content Warning: This collection contains some language related to death and limited images of deceased birds, pinnipeds, and marine life, included with care to highlight the fragility and interconnectedness of coastal ecosystems.
Tidal Language is a four-year exploration of the intertidal zone. Through poetry and photography, Alonna Shaw examines the traces left behind. In this natural and manufactured evidence, beauty, loss, and consequence come into view.
Humor emerges from strange juxtapositions, where unexpected collisions of language and image ask us to see differently.
Blending personal experience, environmental illness, and visual art, she uses hybrid poetics to explore the impact of human interlopers in these shifting tidal margins.
This collection invites readers to pause, observe, and reconsider their relationship with nature and the language that shapes it.
Alonna Shaw is a place-based poet who works across poetry, visual art, and film. Her work explores how memory and the body shape what we carry when language falls short.
A radio conversation and post about the process.
