Name: The Whole Singing Ocean
ISBN: 9780889713789

Jessica Moore

The Whole Singing Ocean

Alison Gadsby

Although marketed as poetry, THE WHOLE SINGING OCEAN is a prosaic tale filled with fragments of memory and a heartbreaking story of abuse. It is structured with jarring shifts in language, font choice and speech that is sometimes in quotes and sometimes not. Moore's shifting language left me wondering where I was at times, but also feeling secure in the knowledge that she knows what she's doing. Also, when she refers to the person whose story she shares here, she says: "I hold his story like a child with a hot bowl of soup in two hands." So it's not hard to trust her. She is careful with this story.

And of course there is the ocean, the plastic island, the pollution, the melting arctic.
In THE WHOLE SINGING OCEAN, the ocean and the whales who inhabit it, feel like they're stuck in the confluence or conflict of human seeing, looking and maybe even seeking. 

Please read this gorgeous book.

The Whole Singing Ocean

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