Sea Smoke, Spindrift and Other Spells: Poems by Shauna Potocky
Shauna Potocky writes of living on the rugged coast of the northern Gulf of Alaska with the clarity of piercing cold and an illuminating light, caught most spectacularly by spindrift and sea smoke when the prevailing clouds part. She arrives as a migrant bird does but settles into the town of Seward, where she deciphers the deeper cycles of land and water that bring moments of upheaval and others of serenity. We feel the warmth of human, and sometimes canine, companionship… [through] skijoring, picking berries, bird counting, or pulling up a seat to the captain’s table. In this collection, we feel the immediacy of existence, the persistence of history, and the connections that are eternal in a spare, loving language.
— Sandra Wassilie, author of The Dream That Is Childhood: A Memoir in Verse
Shauna Potocky echoes Henry David Thoreau’s August 5, 1851 journal entry: “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” She encapsulates Thoreau’s concern in one particular poem, “All The Things We Miss Because We Did Not Look,” and evokes all the senses throughout this collection. Her poetry blends, merges and mixes land and seascapes, history, wildlife, mountains and glaciers. The specific and personal conjure up the intangible and universal forming a unity that transcends Alaska…
— Doug Capra, author of The Spaces Between: Stories from the Kenai Mountains to the Kenai Fjords, and The Last Homesteaders
Includes Artwork by Shauna Potocky
And artwork by Kassandra Mirosh
About Cirque Author — Shauna Potocky
Shauna Potocky has a deep love of jagged peaks, rough edged ridgelines, and natural ecosystems, where the wonder of the world unfolds. Shauna spent her childhood in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California living in an urban landscape framed by dry creek beds and scrub filled hills.
Shauna discovered herself in the Sierra Nevada, with introductions by friends to experiences that demonstrated, if you take the time to slow down, quiet the external pressures and focus on discovering who you really are—you can find yourself.
The lessons taken from that time provided a foundation to face life’s pressures in the shade of tall trees, along the edge of some singing creek no matter how small, looking across people filled or people vacant vistas, and when necessary, turning to the open space of the sky—these have been Shauna’s retreat and navigation points.
Connecting people to place and providing space to explore and discover are Shauna’s passions. Through her writings, she offers up things infrequently spoken of or delivers them in a rare voice, while providing opportunities for people anywhere to connect to their own home or life locations in new ways.
Always, ultimately with the hope of deepening connection and care.
Shauna Potocky is the author of Sea Smoke, Spindrift and Other Spells (2025) and Yosemite Dawning: Poems of the Sierra Nevada (2023) both published by Cirque Press. Her work also appears in Writing Through the Apocalypse (2023), Seward Unleashed Volume III Water and Wonder (2023), Alpinist magazine, Beyond Words International Journal, and Alaska Women Speak. During 2024, Shauna served as Artist in Residence for the Sitka Conservation Society. She established the Seward Poetry Festival, which is a program of the Seward Arts Council. She has served as a book reviewer for the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival for over a decade. Shauna provides poetry readings, workshops, and participates in both art and literary collaborations.
Shauna is deeply grateful to live in the community of Seward, Alaska, which is located within the traditional homelands of the Sugpiaq.