The poems of Anchor enter your consciousness like "warm summer air/ eased through the open window," in a poem about two young girls, a ouija board, and a voice from beyond. Everything in these deeply humane poems-water, air, fire, people-is invested with life, and layered with death. In fall, smoke from burning leaves is "like memories of something lost, something that stings the eyes." Photographed lying on the sand with his "little rump in the air," is a drowned refugee toddler to whom the water "meant to be/peaceful, like a mother's hand." Lewis draws surfaces beautifully, and lets you feel the mystery behind every surface. Alicia Ostriker, author of The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019 New York State Poet, 2018-2021 Reading Anchor is like dreaming a lightning storm while seabound, from start to finish, moon as witness, your own hands wrapped around the pages of the vessel. In her sublime, sonorous book of poems, Lewis builds a boat of nautical, nocturnal imagery to pull us out into her sea of motherhood, and anchors us in that world with historical vignettes of brilliant, subtle relevance. Lewis shows us how the journey is ending even as it's begun, how we are all adrift, in place and ashore exactly where we are; how although nothing is promised, we must still push the boat forward. Every mother, sailor and passenger in the sea of life should read this captivating and sublunary collection of poems. Joan Kwon Glass, author of How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy and Night Swim How I loved Issa Lewis's debut collection. The poems seem created from the four elements that sustain us all-fire, air, earth, and water. I was stunned as the words gathered around "a heart heavy," with "thoughts too long for breath." There is the constant movement of waves and tides, promising "the loss of things," always on the verge of heat. Lewis dares to speak of this fury and "pain on a scale so exquisite, it becomes craving, it becomes moon pulling tide." The poems are so well-crafted, they are as natural as breath. I will return again and again to Anchor to experience these poems for a "heady, out-of-control moment/to touch both sand and sky..." Jennifer Martelli, author of My Tarantella and In the Year of Ferraro