Beth Oast Williams’s poetry has appeared in West Texas Literary Review, Wisconsin Review, Glass Mountain, and The Bookends Review, among others.  She was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart Prize in poetry, received second place in the 2019 Poetry Matters Project, and was a semi-finalist for Poet’s Billow 2018 Atlantis Award.

In Riding Horses in the Harbor, Beth Williams takes us to the blurry edge where land meets water and asks us to consider the source of our own rivers, the inlets of our waiting, what things flood over us like love. In the garden, there are vines and tomatoes; rain, a world that “reads like a newfound poem.” Is land or the river mother’s body, lost but eternally present? Sometimes, the river is meringue; sometimes it is a bottomless vessel which carries the bodies of those that “never made it to land.” No matter; from the very first moment we’re thrown in, unsuspecting, the poet instructs us to move with the current: “you are your own/ canoe, carved out/ and hollow.” And we trust her when she places these wise poems in our hands as a “way to get home.”

–Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (fall 2020) and The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (2018)