Amazon Category:  Poetry Publisher: Four Way Books ISBN-10:  1884800807 Pages: 94 Copyright: October, 2007 ISBN-13: 9781884800807 A book-length narrative prose poem telling the geography of a woman's life from Pole to Pole. Degrees of Latitude starts with a swim at the North Pole!  As it proceeds through the northern latitudinal zones, across the Equator, and through the southern latitudes to the South Pole, it tells the geography of its protagonist's life, including her childhood, her disastrous marriages, her alcoholism, and her recovery from her difficult and privileged past, culminating in her empowering realization that, in the desolate wilderness of the Antarctic, she is nothing more than an "obstacle to the wind." Eighteen years in the making, Degrees of Latitude began as a daily journal into which Blossom incorporated the travel journal from her "expedition" to the North Pole the year she turned 50.  It was the addition of the travel journal to the daily journal that suggested the structure of the book. Developing and refining that structure took time, many drafts, a recognition that a work that begins as prose probably wants to remain as prose, a trip to the Antarctic Peninsula, and finally, an "expedition" to the South Pole to see for herself what the bottom of the world feels like.  Blossom is one of only a few dozen people -  perhaps a few hundred by now - who have been to both Poles.  The North Pole was first claimed by a white man, Commander Robert Peary, on Aoril 6, 1909.  It was 100 years ago that the race for the South Pole took place between Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who reached the Pole on December 15, 2011, and Robert Falcon Scott, the English hero who reached it one month later, on January 17, 2012, and died with his men on the way back. Excerpt THE EQUATOR My father walked me down the spiral staircase. He held my hand, he was nervous as a wreck, he was crying. I was his bride descending the stair. He held my hand, tears like petals in my hair. In the Northern Hemisphere, water swirls counter-clockwise. Called it a flaw in the ointment, a monkey in the wrench. Held me on his lap, named the birds, carried me into the endless ocean. Junket, oriole, Der Rosenkavalier. Made us all listen to the train through the living room, stereophonic sound. Taught us good manners. Don’t talk with your mouth open. Never hand Daddy anything filled with a snake. Punched my mother in the stomach, cardinal, chickadee. Held my hand, hosted parties for Ike. Never saw a movie he hadn’t seen before. Held me up in the waves, tanager, cedar waxwing, pulled panicking a towel around his naked waist. Slammed the bathroom door in my face. White space. But blue tufted couch, blue smoke of his cigarette, indigo bunting. Let me bury my face in his neck, good-bye. Disappeared (again) overseas, into Atlas Shrugged, his second wife, into the gin that (HINTS FROM HELOISE) brings wilted lilacs back to life. Signed himself: Devotedly, Dad. In the Southern Hemisphere water spirals clockwise. Then he sat in his easy chair by the library window. He smelled of red leather, martinis, Chesterfields. I sat across from him on the couch in the middle of Saturday, woods at a distance repeating themselves, this used to be my house, this used to be my dad, there was nothing for us to say to each other. Not one word. Not one bird. Woods like an echo. Nothing when I smoked, when I drank said nothing, but (once upon a time) had named the birds. Equinox, equator, in medias res. Day divided equally from night. Humankind at the crack, the crack of. Here water falls like grief, straight down.

Carolyn Forché says:
Laurel Blossom’s Degrees of Latitude is almost a lyric novel, so sweepingly re-imagined is the life it illuminates, but it is as well an expedition into territory seldom explored in lyric mode. Blossom begins her journey on an ice-breaker during the white nights of a polar north—cold as childhood—and then turns her gaze upon the uncharted regions of family history, secrecy and illusion, bravely and with uncommon self-knowledge, in deft and beautifully cadenced language that belies the arduousness of her task. This work crosses, formally and insightfully, the traditional borders of confession and memoir, and moves into the unknown, mapping what is visible as well as what has, until now, been hidden. I have been waiting a long time to read this book, and it is very much worth the wait.


Jason Shinder says:
Degrees of Latitude is a remarkable book length poem that captures our culture in crisis and celebration. Blossom has extended, and renewed, her already formidable work. She has created a visionary, deeply felt, meditation set in every emotional, sexual, political, addictive and moral landscape of the body and soul. Through lyric meditation, overheard conversation, personal anecdote, newspaper entries, and journals, she charts an interior life not seen before but at once recognizable. I love how this book renews one’s faith in the possibilities of poetry, and in its power to delight with true innovation and luminous renewal.

Jane Miller says:
As natural as speech or thinking, the poems in Degrees of Latitude consist mostly of single sentences, alone, like persons, and as alive. In developing the conceit of the great globe’s zones, Laurel Blossom’s decision to make “literal” the world of the personal, and the global, strikes me as poetic justice. We have the wounds of the earth and the wounds of its inhabitants made transparent by blunt truths. This is an intimate book, without explanations or conclusions for our suffering. Rather, the poems perceive our inheritances – of the body and of the planet – critically and graphically.