Like the wading birds of the title, the poems in this collection find their sustenance in the ground, tilling the earthly measure, even as they lift questions toward the heavens. Summoning the pastoral and the oracular by turns, the poems of Sanderlings achieve a preternatural rapture, both sensual and learned.

Geri Doran’s first poetry collection, Resin (LSU, 2005), was selected by Henri Cole for the Academy of American Poets’ 2004 Walt Whitman Award. Sanderlings was chosen twice as runner-up for Tupelo Press’s Dorset Prize, selected by Ilya Kaminsky (2009) and Jane Hirshfield (2010). She has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Oregon Literary Arts. Raised in Montana, she holds degrees from Vassar College and the University of Florida and has also studied at Clare College, Cambridge, and Stanford University. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Oregon in Eugene.