Sea Poems

The sea in these pages is not merely a backdrop but a mirror for the soul's deepest currents. Cale Young Rice, writing from his Kentucky homeland far from any shore, transforms the remote ocean into a vast canvas for longing, loss, and transcendence. These poems carry the weight of isolation and the ache of distances, both physical and emotional, rendering the tide's pull as something internal, personal, unavoidable. Rice moves between tempests and stillness, capturing how the sea can simultaneously terrify and console. Each poem offers a different facet of this eternal relationship between human emotion and natural force. The rhythm of waves becomes the rhythm of breath, of grief, of hope. Written in the early twentieth century, this collection speaks to anyone who has ever stood at the edge of something vast and felt both their own smallness and their strange belonging to it.