What do you think?
Rate this book
The Appalachian Sea: Poems
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2025
Steve Scafidi’s The Appalachian Sea explores the eponymous place of mountains and story, of rivers and magic, as well as of mortality, where people work and live and die. What began as an homage to the American painter Miles Cleveland Goodwin became a celebration of the spectral qualities of place and home. The artist’s gothic imagery of haints and dark orchards haunts the book, wherein the Shenandoah wends, old farmers toil, and ghosts wander a land where change comes on like a flood. There is no escape from this spilling river, the “Appalachian sea,” yet for a while we get by and survive. These poems sing of the temporary persistence that makes what surrounds us beloved and strange.
Steve Scafidi’s The Appalachian Sea explores the eponymous place of mountains and story, of rivers and magic, as well as of mortality, where people work and live and die. What began as an homage to the American painter Miles Cleveland Goodwin became a celebration of the spectral qualities of place and home. The artist’s gothic imagery of haints and dark orchards haunts the book, wherein the Shenandoah wends, old farmers toil, and ghosts wander a land where change comes on like a flood. There is no escape from this spilling river, the “Appalachian sea,” yet for a while we get by and survive. These poems sing of the temporary persistence that makes what surrounds us beloved and strange.
- GenresPoetry
71 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 3, 2025
About the author
Steve Scafidi
9 books12 followersSteve Scafidi is the author of four poetry collections, including Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer and To the Bramble and the Briar. He lives in Summit Point, West Virginia.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 19, 2025
There are some really powerful poems in here, the kinds of poems that I seek out, about art and death and nature.
Read
July 20, 2026stunning lyrics that surprises in every line. alive and haunted.
Of a Long Life
It seems rare to travel great distances like this.
The train moves out and goes and the conductor
Finds us where we are, helps us out and gets
Us to where we need and the uniform is polite
And clean. Going to Sacramento, ok. To Duluth,
Alright come on. In the last days of her mother's
Life she pantomimed giving her ticket to whoever
Was there, waiting for someone to stamp it, take it
Gently from her hand and say there you go and so
Assure her. We took it from her for three long days
While it snowed sideways out the hospital window.
And the snow fell through her eyes—opaque,
Open to whatever she saw in or out of them:
Lake Superior in 1943, her father walking
Into the water with her astride his shoulders.
His jet-black hair she held to as they went
Under a moment and rose again to the blue of sky
Like his eyes and her mother's kerchief on her head
Up on the beach. Which she focused on
As she left the room and the snow stopped.
Fishing under the Moon
For catfish, we caught an eel in the Shenandoah moving along
Cold in the August periphery of summer and so it was
Prehistoric and writhing and white as moons in mirrors
Or the hand of god raised to snatch at you as Mike grabbed
The head, undid the hook, and it sliced and twisted in the air
Before it was thrown back into the dark river that goes to die
At Harpers Ferry or to change into another river, the Potomac, That goes to die or to change into a current of the ocean
That goes to die or to change along the coasts of everywhere
At every time all over the world washing up, washing up
Onto the sand or crash-landing onto rocks and boulders under
Cliffs where people stand or edge themselves nearer and nearer
Just to look down and wonder at the fall that might break our bones
And feed the hungry flicker-fish and octopus and the squids Floating in the depths alone, alone, only sometimes rising up
To be glimpsed or washed on shore flattened by their own weight
And gravity pressing until we come along by accident with our Phones and see the great mass of squid and the great arms Tentacled and unmoving, the thrash gone, the willowy light Undulations of movement gone, the sensitive beak open,
The liquid eye still alive gigantic watching us as we approach.
Of a Long Life
It seems rare to travel great distances like this.
The train moves out and goes and the conductor
Finds us where we are, helps us out and gets
Us to where we need and the uniform is polite
And clean. Going to Sacramento, ok. To Duluth,
Alright come on. In the last days of her mother's
Life she pantomimed giving her ticket to whoever
Was there, waiting for someone to stamp it, take it
Gently from her hand and say there you go and so
Assure her. We took it from her for three long days
While it snowed sideways out the hospital window.
And the snow fell through her eyes—opaque,
Open to whatever she saw in or out of them:
Lake Superior in 1943, her father walking
Into the water with her astride his shoulders.
His jet-black hair she held to as they went
Under a moment and rose again to the blue of sky
Like his eyes and her mother's kerchief on her head
Up on the beach. Which she focused on
As she left the room and the snow stopped.
Fishing under the Moon
For catfish, we caught an eel in the Shenandoah moving along
Cold in the August periphery of summer and so it was
Prehistoric and writhing and white as moons in mirrors
Or the hand of god raised to snatch at you as Mike grabbed
The head, undid the hook, and it sliced and twisted in the air
Before it was thrown back into the dark river that goes to die
At Harpers Ferry or to change into another river, the Potomac, That goes to die or to change into a current of the ocean
That goes to die or to change along the coasts of everywhere
At every time all over the world washing up, washing up
Onto the sand or crash-landing onto rocks and boulders under
Cliffs where people stand or edge themselves nearer and nearer
Just to look down and wonder at the fall that might break our bones
And feed the hungry flicker-fish and octopus and the squids Floating in the depths alone, alone, only sometimes rising up
To be glimpsed or washed on shore flattened by their own weight
And gravity pressing until we come along by accident with our Phones and see the great mass of squid and the great arms Tentacled and unmoving, the thrash gone, the willowy light Undulations of movement gone, the sensitive beak open,
The liquid eye still alive gigantic watching us as we approach.
June 22, 2025
I loved everything about this collection. The author is very talented and has a voice that carries you through poems about life and death, pain and joy, loss and hope, and other bittersweet human experiences. This book feels like playing in overgrown fields in summer, putting pennies on railroad tracks, and home.
____
Thank you to Edelweiss and the publisher for the digital review copy!
____
Thank you to Edelweiss and the publisher for the digital review copy!
May 25, 2026
Had some very beautiful poems (Near The Holy Cross Abbey, A Mangled Bird in the Moss, A Poor Man's Grave, and A Child's Leg with a White Shoe), but overall just not a very interesting work and oddly organized (maybe this is a personal nitpick, but I did expect them to be some rationale behind the sorting of books in a poetry collection).
June 26, 2025
The celebrations, impermanence, loves and horrors of life live in these poems.
January 8, 2026
Wendell Berry of West Virginia. iykyk.
January 10, 2026
I was deeply moved by his startling poems.
May 25, 2026
I want to hand out copies of this beautiful and haunting collection to everyone with a pulse.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews