The Glass Jar

Erin Fristad survived 15 years commercial fishing in Alaska. She went to sea for months at a time living in tight quarters with men she was neither related to nor intimate with. She fended off drunks, heard the confession of many an infidel, and rode the waves of passion like a highliner. She fell asleep to sounds of humpback whales, bathed in hotsprings under the Northern Lights, and saw men reduced to tears by their drive to make living on a relentless ocean. Erin fell in love with a way of life shaped by the natural world and threatened by changing values, environmental destruction and greed. When she thought fishing had proved her hardworking and savvy, she went crabbing and learned she was a greenhorn all over again.
These poems bring women to their feet cheering the unflinching honesty with which they portray working is a man's world. And the men of this world, they rise too, offering gratitude as these poems document the wild landscape where they feel most at home, but few people will every understand. These poems look deep into the lives and hearts of commercial fishermen and fisherwomen-into the wild in all our hearts-to praise the bittersweet complexity of what it means to be human.
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By this book's light you peer through a porthole of visceral poetry and prose into a life onboard where the hiss of the stove, seething fish-hold, deckhand's mood, rough weather and scant wages all cast you free from landed comforts. You are no longer their prisoner. By choosing the working life, Fristad's fine intelligence has great gifts for the reader's mind. -Kim Stafford, author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft
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With The Glass Jar, Erin Fristad opens for everyone a surprisingly human and direct path into the mind and heart of today's commercial fishing deckhand. Whether it's a consideration of the sublime of the wild, a frank depiction of the ugly side of crewmates or a yawp of praise at being alive one more day, this fierce writing beats with the blood at the heart of all living beings.
-Moe Bowstern, writer, artist, fisherwoman and editor/publisher of the award winning zine, Xtra Tuf since 1996.