The Crossing Over

The Crossing Over by Jen Karetnick is the winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Poetry Chapbook Contest. These poems about the migrant experience in the Mediterranean, narrated from the boat's point of view, begin with the crafting of the vehicle - the birth of its voice - and end with its destruction. As much participant as it is victim, the boat is the lens through which the reader sees all that happens to the refugees: smuggling, hunger and thirst, rape, drowning, organ stealing, deportation, and repatriation - and, for some, survival in a new country. Embodied by its burden of human experience, from birth in open international waters to an airplane exploding overhead from a bomb, the boat strives to interact with humans, good and evil, as well as the Mediterranean Sea itself, and all that it contains and maintains, both natural and made. As such, it takes on a variety of personas, becoming at turns unwitting witness to and un/willing partner of the refugees of various global crises, who have no choice but to make these desperate ocean journeys.