Betsy Andrews is the author of The Bottom (42 Miles Press, 2014), winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Prize, and New Jersey (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), which was awarded the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Her chapbooks include She-Devil (Sardines Press, 2003), In Trouble (Boog Press, 2004), and Supercollider (2006), a collaboration with the artist Peter Fox. Her writing has appeared widely in publications ranging from Fence, Stone Canoe, and Phoebe to the Yemeni newspaper Culture. She is a graduate of the MFA program in poetry at George Mason University. Betsy is also the executive editor of Saveur magazine. She has taught numerous courses on poetry and creative writing as well as food writing.

Books by Betsy Andrews:

Other poems on the web by Betsy Andrews:
Two poems

About The Bottom:

"'It's night on the blood-dimmed gulf between ethics and murk,' Andrews writes, free-diving through tumultuous seas of language to THE BOTTOM, our present on this ghosted earth. Hers is a water-poet's inventory, cry and lamentation in one book-length tsunami of plangent musical phrases that might have frothed from the mouth of Whitman. From strength to strength she writes, pulling everything up into her net that need concern us now lest we harm the world beyond salvage. A stunning achievement destined to be among the great poems of our time."
—Carolyn Forché

"The Bottom is an unrelenting poem of hypnotic chants, leaps, and catalogs through which Betsy Andrews dives into the vast ocean of the damaged and endangered planet. As she navigates the wreckage and erosion, she also affirms the force of love. This is an urgent lyric vision of our time."
—Peter Balakian

"In the halcyon days the mighty ocean's depths were the stuff of sublime poetry. Now they are gridded, trawled, and plundered, teeming with everyday living's gunk our Coppertone, our PCBs, our water bottles, our 'polypropylene doodads.' Andrews's kaleidoscopic long poem, with its urgently imaginative lexicon and leaps, reminds us that a day at the beach can be no longer. In its rejection of poetry's tropes and passivity-inducing illusions this important work demands that we stay alert. Have we hit bottom yet?"
—Mónica de la Torre