Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home
by Rebecca Loudon
Publication Date: October 2, 2006
38 pages
Available as FREE eBook (PDF)
What People are Saying about Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home:
". . .Loudon's poetic sensibilities, echoing the outrage and eroticism of Jorie Graham and Sylvia Plath at times, and the matter-of-factness of William Carlos Williams at others, navigate through the destabilizing mythos surrounding the historical Earhart. . . The tone of these Earhart poems is both wild and restrained, with a well-intoned formal diversity that mirrors the becalmed panic edging each poem. What we are treated to in this this small, provocative book is a vision of loss and forgetfullness almost too close to bear, making it easy to marvel at Loudon's poetic range, her prescience and daring in the face of such cataclysm."
— Derek Pollard, American Book Review (March/April 2007)
"The pleasure in reading this book is putting all the little pieces together so that we can examine the whole and in constructing a story for these characters and these thoughts that make sense, given the little we know about the speaker."
— Laurel Snyder, Atlanta Style & Design, (Spring 2007)
"Rebecca Loudon has not merely evoked Amelia Earhart, she has inhabited her. These spare, elegiac poems ache with a devastating beauty. They will remind you of what you've lost, and fill you with lovely, terrible hope."
— Susan Butler
"Electric, stinging, sweet. Do you like the phrase "from the missing diary"? Letters, lists? There was a meme going around a while ago: "Name a book that made you giddy. A book that made you sad." If I were asked today? Navigate. Written in a fever, Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home will make you cry and spin. Read it in one sitting (walking the wing), then again. Don't forget to breathe."
— Kate Greenstreet
"I love the things of these poems, because they are made of stuff and they make stuff – because the things show the reader how detail becomes mile marker, horizon line, navigation point too."
— Jen Tynes at Horse Less Notes, read entire review here
"Acutely sensual, startlingly agonizing, these poems reveal an individual, likeable but idiosyncratic and aching with a desire for freedom even at the cost of life itself."
— Jeannine Hall Gailey at Galatea Resurrection, read entire review here
"Loudon (who is no stranger to all things aeronautical, having worked for many years on Boeing jetliners) virtually inhabits the mind and soul of Amelia Earhart, in the days after her plane crashes at sea, or perhaps washes ashore on a deserted tropical island."
— Peter Pereira, read entire review here
"I have read Navigate. I am still recovering. It is under my skin, spinning. And I think it's in my dreams, because last night I thought I was sunburned and barefooted and crazy on a large, dark beach. I might have been tearing up strips of paper from an old book, and there might have been fire."
— Christine Hamm
"She makes me uncomfortable. She makes my bones itch. She sets off bells deep in the vault of my skull."
— Scott Odom, read entire review here
"Navigate is beautiful, brilliant, full of leaps, frightening and funny and strange."
— 21km up the valley, read entire review here
"Best Cover Art of the Year"
— Matthew Thorburn, read entire review here
To my Muriel, my doppelgänger, my darling, my negative eye,
You mad scientist with a swing set.
I hear you banged your chin.
Little sister, don't go down,
don't go down the stairs into the dark
unadorned. I have sent you holiday gifts –
Marchpane comfits, mead, pickled meats.
I am too young to be doing such work.
There are waves here that don’t move.
Who would have suspected such a thing?
I need a new swimsuit.
Love, Amelia
