Mending the Nets

Mending the Nets: each new knot, a soul impression of family life and isolation, flashed forward for meaning - for liberation. Cast in a disruptive family web of fishermen, this is a raw intimacy poetics in touch with uniquely Floridian elemental forces, where air, sunlight, water, and sand are subtly transformative. "My job is to jump in and let the water rearrange me. The wake I've made swells into every area of my life, and the results are infinite."

This is a monograph of 20th-century Florida in flash descriptions mending the 'intra-' with the 'inter-' personal in the dark. "I follow the moon. The dark doesn't scare me. The night sky, my classroom."

-Sabrina Dalla Valle, author, The Night House

Maureen McDole's Mending the Nets is a saltwater-streaked love letter to a younger self and a song for the poet's place in her lineage of sailors and carnies. In this poetic memoir with the intimate feel of a journal, the poet invites us into her only "safe space: pen to paper, sliding my emotions across the lines" until we witness her words weaving nets to carry our younger selves. Like a net, the poems patch together generations tied to the sea, and alongside sweeping storms of familial strife and silence, McDole finds musical, heartfelt reflections. We "stingray shuffle along the sandy foundation of the earth" through the waves and seaweed that shaped generations. To the steady pace of "live oaks dripping Spanish moss, swamps and freshwater springs," the poet untangles the past, mending her love for the place she has always called home.

-Sara Ries Dziekonski and Lake Angela, The Poetry Midwives

Mending the Nets, McDole's new collection, recounts the sometimes-difficult history of an iconic Florida family in poems that are both vivid and vulnerable. Authentic and self-knowing, McDole claims "The dark doesn't scare me," and why would it, when everywhere in this book are pops of joy.

-Gianna Russo, author, One House Down