Overview

Pacific Pieces drifts readers through the beginnings of what an undertaking like crossing the Pacific Ocean by sailboat entails. The sequential poems written by Magdalena Hirt about her family of six and their adventures as they cross the Pacific Ocean is the first in a three-book series. Snug and squeezed into their Westerly 49, Selkie, they emerge from their hurricane hole in Rio Dulce, Guatemala, escape a possible pirate attack off the coast of Honduras, pass through the Panama Canal, experience the Galapagos with Covid, and survive twenty-three days at sea to reach the Marquesas. Poems give detailed bites, moments of moon and stars, terrifying defeat, friendship, love of open water with family, booby bird invasion, equator crossing, fog of Covid, environmental crisis, Dracula sunrises, gothic darkness, perfect breezes, huge swells, endless destinations, and the comfort of mountainous islands.

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"Magdelena Hirt's Pacific Pieces builds on her previous chapbooks, creating a rare chronicle of a family's life at sea. But this is not your usual logbook. ""My rhythm is slight bounce / of the hull, motor-push, / current sway, dolphin play, / depth-watcher, lighthouse,"" writes Hirt. With this lyric movement of push and sway, caution and play, Pacific Pieces carries us from Guatemala through the Panama Canal, around the Galapagos Islands and finally across the Pacific. There is danger here, on both land and water-from a bout with COVID to a spinnaker down. But the poet and her crew keep faith ""in instruments and shipwright / hands,"" and, always, in the expanse of sky and water. The abiding theme here is one of presence, and how a life at sea hones the attention to a fine point: ""The point? What's the point? Being now. / Living as the earth lives-in movement.""-Laura Donnelly, author of Midwest Gothic ""The middle of nowhere is the center of everywhere"" is a line from a French Polynesian poem, the closing poem in Maggie Hirt's arresting work, Pacific Pieces. After we've prevailed one harrowing experience after another in this third chapbook, we most certainly realize what life's like without, shall we say, any landmarks. We are indeed in the center of everywhere aboard the sailboat that serves as full-time home for her, her husband, and their remarkable children. Describing each member of this family as embodying courage is an understatement. Again and again they encounter the forewarned yet unpredictable: upsurges of tumultuous waves, weather that can change before one can make adequate preparation, risks of tumbling overboard into seas populated by poisonous jellyfish, sharks, any deadly denizen happy to enjoy a flailing limb, of course Covid, and even pirates. Hirt not only takes her turns at the helm, but also fulfills her callings as mother, nurse, cook, and ""mate"" ready to take over or serve as enabler under any emergency. Somehow she works in the time to compose poems that reveal an artistry that creates the feeling of one event after another in tones, lines, timings, structures, fragments, and rhythms that evoke the experience they/we survive. Stunning is the poise of presence that comes through in each poem's voice. Read Pacific Pieces with suspense and admiration, wondering through each poem how this family prevails over the pandemic in the Pacific, nowhere and everywhere.-Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, named by ForeWords Review as co-recipient of the nation's finest collection of poetry for 2013 The sea is life's rhythm throughout the sequences of poems that shape Pacific Pieces. On these waters ""the wind puts the otherworld to sleep,"" and ""seductive night moves"" weave their ""pre-dawn secrets."" Those luminous secrets might be the trailing lights of a ghost ship, magical phosphorescence, dwindling stars, or the ladder of the Panama Canal ""ushering the next step/ the next world."" In these fine and ever-alert poems, Maggie Hirt continues her family's journey, degree-by-degree, around the world. Lifting and falling with the seas, kids clamped in life jackets, a dead bird caught in the sail's rigging, blue-footed boobies, the Southern Cross, but always ""this labyrinth of water...water everywhere, so much blue."" These are substantial, uniquely informed and alert poems.-Joel Lipman, 2022 Axon Creative Fellow, University of Toledo"

Author Information

Magdalena Louise Hirt has a Master of Arts in English Literature from the University of Toledo and a Master of Letters from the University of Highlands and Islands for Scottish Highland and Islands Literature.Magdalena has multiple published articles in Cruising World, one in Enchanted Living, and another in Literary Traveler. Her first two poetry chapbooks, Levels of the Ocean and Her Sea-filled Arms: Layers of Blue are available for purchase. Two more chapbooks, Pacific Prescription: Leukemia Cyclone and Her Bloody Project are due to be released in 2024, and her first book (with poetry and prose), called Distant Story Blue, will be released by 2025. She has four self-published chapbooks, an article published via E-book from being a featured speaker at a conference in Oxford, and poems that have been published in The Holland Sentinel, News from Hope College, The Mill from the University of Toledo, and on display at the Toledo Museum of Art, which included first place and finalist awards. At Grand Valley State University, she received 1st place in fiction and 2nd place in poetry for the Oldenburg Writing Contest. She has been a featured speaker at a literary conference in Boston and two Poetry Speaks at the University of Toledo. She is currently finishing a script, a novel, two more chapbooks, and a collection of short stories. With her teaching degree, she has taught Middle School Language Arts and Freshman Composition at the University of Toledo.Currently, she homeschools her four children and writes from her sailboat, which is a Westerly 49, named Selkie. Their family of six sails to circumnavigate the globe. So far, they have cruised, wintered, and been through lockdown in the following locations: the Great Lakes of Michigan, the Caribbean, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Azores, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, the circle of the Baltic Sea, the Bay of Biscay, Canary Isles, Cape Verde, back to the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Panama, French Polynesia, the Kingdom of Tonga, and New Zealand. These locations completed an Atlantic circumnavigation and a Pacific crossing. Her family plans to finish a global circumnavigation by 2025 and continue to sail.Magdalena enjoys cooking and dancing-most of the time together. With pen, spatula, and helm in hand, her sailing soul belongs on the sea where she chooses words, academics, ingredients, and destinations. Follow their story at www.sealongingselkie.net.

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