Sawgrass Sky is a coming-of-age story, a Floridian memoir-in-verse. Through the speaker's recounting of his adolescence, the collection addresses themes of religious disillusionment, sexual awakening, body image, environmental degradation, suburbia versus the wild, familial history, and the idea of home contextualized by distance. These poems vary in form and style, including long narratives, meditative sequences, prose poems, and short lyrics. The unifying factor is the speaker's focus on the place he comes from, and his struggle to define that heritage in terms psychological, natural, and familial.
The poems that comprise this collection have been published widely in reputable literary journals. These magazines include The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, North American Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, and Southern Humanities Review.
From "Rats"
when I lie awake before sleep they are
the thoughts dying and dying
but going nowhere
they are the hands of the sewers
running their claws across the tin
roofs of houses
all that water underneath rising
About the Author: ANDREW HEMMERT is a sixth-generation Floridian. His poems have appeared in various magazines, including The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, and Prairie Schooner. He won the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Contest. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and currently lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
