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Enid Shomer’s new book, Riptide: New and Selected Poems, is now available for pre-order from Blair! Pre-order here. Available June 23rd, 2026 Award-winning poet Enid Shomer’s new and selected poems explore family, nature, and the many facets of womanhood, from youthful desire to life’s later stages. |
In Riptide, Shomer’s poems, written over the last forty years, illuminate the nature of being—whether human or kudzu—“this / headlong rush, this stammer / of green, this slow / stampede toward light.” Elegant lyrics, anchored in her beloved Florida landscape, use stunning imagery to convey Shomer’s rapturous engagement with the natural world. Longer sequences showcase narrative and formal dexterity while deftly bringing historical personae to life in poems such as “Pope Joan.” New poems powerfully examine mortality and sensuality as experienced in an aging body.
With lush music and deeply spiritual attention, Shomer’s work transforms the mundane into the numinous. Now in her early eighties, Shomer is still at the top of her form.
"Within Riptide surge currents of ferocity and tenderness. Intimate details in Enid Shomer's poems have always illuminated larger historical exigencies and social realities. Across her books, we see love and tragedy in family life; shrewd depictions of American places; the joyful body before inevitable decline. These narratives, composed with lush metaphor and pitch-perfect tone, resonate with music and wisdom. Shomer's biographical poems about aviator Jacqueline Cochran offer a master class in documentary poetics. Among the new poems, the ten-sonnet sequence titled Medical Arts' delivers a clear-eyed picture of our technology-driven lives. This is a book to savor." - ROBIN BECKER, author of Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems
"A major achievement, brimming with love and pain and that rare poetic virtue: plain wisdom...Read this great gathering to feel the sweep and force of a life's work, and to hear one of our most soulful writers at her very best." - PATRICK PHILLIPS, author of Elegy for a Broken Machine and Song of the Closing Doors
"Florida, nay, all the wet and dry states, applaud! Shomer's Riptide pulls you into the deepest Atlantic waters, decade by decade, with her steady brilliance...Shomer even walks 'dogly' through medical nightmares to tell us that 'pain is the ribbon tied around pleasure.' Highly recommended." - TERESE SOBODA, author of Theatrix: Poetry Plays
"In one of the new poems gathered here, the speaker observes a series of commonplace items in a museum and notices that 'There's something holy about these objects now / that remembrance has conferred its grace. This has always been Enid Shomer's gift. Her voluptuous, unflinching, formally dexterous poems apply a vividness and clarity of attention that sets each subject on its pedestal." - GEORGE DAVID CLARK, author of Newly Not Eternal
With lush music and deeply spiritual attention, Shomer’s work transforms the mundane into the numinous. Now in her early eighties, Shomer is still at the top of her form.
"Within Riptide surge currents of ferocity and tenderness. Intimate details in Enid Shomer's poems have always illuminated larger historical exigencies and social realities. Across her books, we see love and tragedy in family life; shrewd depictions of American places; the joyful body before inevitable decline. These narratives, composed with lush metaphor and pitch-perfect tone, resonate with music and wisdom. Shomer's biographical poems about aviator Jacqueline Cochran offer a master class in documentary poetics. Among the new poems, the ten-sonnet sequence titled Medical Arts' delivers a clear-eyed picture of our technology-driven lives. This is a book to savor." - ROBIN BECKER, author of Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems
"A major achievement, brimming with love and pain and that rare poetic virtue: plain wisdom...Read this great gathering to feel the sweep and force of a life's work, and to hear one of our most soulful writers at her very best." - PATRICK PHILLIPS, author of Elegy for a Broken Machine and Song of the Closing Doors
"Florida, nay, all the wet and dry states, applaud! Shomer's Riptide pulls you into the deepest Atlantic waters, decade by decade, with her steady brilliance...Shomer even walks 'dogly' through medical nightmares to tell us that 'pain is the ribbon tied around pleasure.' Highly recommended." - TERESE SOBODA, author of Theatrix: Poetry Plays
"In one of the new poems gathered here, the speaker observes a series of commonplace items in a museum and notices that 'There's something holy about these objects now / that remembrance has conferred its grace. This has always been Enid Shomer's gift. Her voluptuous, unflinching, formally dexterous poems apply a vividness and clarity of attention that sets each subject on its pedestal." - GEORGE DAVID CLARK, author of Newly Not Eternal