Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit Linda at TeacherDance for Roundup.
This week's Tuesday 2-Minute Writing Tip 30 is for fiction writers, about leaning into fear when you're creating a plot. I hope you find it useful!
And now I'm excited to welcome my dear friend Doraine Bennett to the blog to respond to some simple prompts as they apply to her brand-new verse novel In the Grip of the Ice (Bandersnatch Books, 2026). What's it about?
According to Kirkus: "A teenage stowaway records the disastrous course of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Antarctic expedition."
Here's the blurb I provided after reading the ARC: "Stow away for a few hours in these pages to experience a dark, frozen world that—thanks to Bennett's deep research and vivid poetic voice—radiates warmth, humanity, and hope."
*Leave a comment below to be entered to win a signed copy of the book! Entries open thru 11:59 pm Monday March 16. Winner announced here on the blog Friday March 20!
I remember Doraine reading snippets of this work in progress years ago, so it's especially fun to see it now in book format, soon to be in readers' hands! Here's the opening poem:
Welcome, Doraine!
FRESH
DB: This manuscript has languished for a long time, collecting digital dust in a virtual drawer. I discovered Bandersnatch Books in the summer of 2024 when they sent out a call for submissions. They specialize in books that are a little off the beaten path—stories traditional publishers often don’t have room or time for—and they are especially interested in works that bridge the reading space between middle grade and young adult.
In January of 2025, I received word that they wanted to publish my book. For a while it felt like a dream. Bandersnatch is a small press that publishes only five books a year, so I was absolutely thrilled.
When Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, was discovered beneath the ice of the Weddell Sea in 2022, interest in the expedition—and in Shackleton’s remarkable leadership that ultimately brought every man home—was reignited around the world. The wreck was found nearly 10,000 feet below the surface, less than two miles from the location the ship’s navigator, Frank Worsley, had recorded when it sank 107 years earlier. More than a hundred years later, the story still has the power to capture our imagination. My book returns to that remarkable expedition through the voice of the young stowaway who secretly climbed aboard the Endurance—a nineteen-year-old who had no idea he was stepping into one of the greatest survival stories ever told.
DIFFICULT
DB: The most difficult aspect of writing In the Grip of the Ice was piecing together the journey from the journals the men left behind. Every story has many angles of vision. Each man recorded what he saw and felt in the moment, and those perspectives don’t always align neatly. The events remain the same, but the story bends slightly depending on whose voice is telling it.
 |
Doraine's office wall while trying
to make sense of the story. |
Some men wrote about the brutal cold. Others about the work of hauling sledges. Still others about the strange routines that developed as the ship drifted in the ice for months—reading aloud, playing games, writing letters home that might never be sent.My task was to gather all of those voices and wrangle them into a single, coherent narrative while still honoring the human experience inside the journals.
DELICIOUS
DB: Poetry is delicious. It compresses language until every word has flavor. A single image can carry the weight of an entire scene.
When I began writing In the Grip of the Ice, I discovered that poetry was the best way to hold the fragments I found in the journals of Shackleton’s crew. Verse allowed me to distill moments—the groaning of the ice, the endless drift, the uncertainty of survival—into something that could carry both the event and the emotion of the men living through it.
Poetry also has a unique ability to enter the inner landscape of a character. In a few lines, it can hold fear, hope, loneliness, or courage, and invite the reader to imagine not just what happened, but what it might have felt like to stand on that vast Antarctic ice.
There was another reason poetry felt right for this story. Shackleton himself often recited poetry to encourage his men during the darkest stretches of the expedition. Telling the story in verse felt like honoring that small but powerful thread running through their journey.
ANYTHING ELSE
DB: I love reading aloud, so sharing a few of these poems brought me so much delight when friends organized a launch party earlier this week. It was just so much fun! Poetry really does come alive when it’s spoken. Hearing the rhythm of the lines and feeling the pauses land in a room full of people made the story feel new again, even to me.
After spending so many years quietly working on the manuscript, it was a joy to hear the words spoken aloud and shared with others. For a moment, it felt as if the long journey of this book had finally found its voice.
--
Thank you, Doraine!! Y'all, don't miss this book. It's special!
For my ArtSpeak: WOMEN poem, I've chosen from the Harper's Bazaar list another new-to-me artist, Leonora Carrington. Her work is surreal, wildly imaginative, and, okay, odd. But that's what's so cool about it! I was instantly drawn into this piece from the title alone: And Then We Met the Daughter of the Minotaur. A story is happening! What is that story? It could be so many things! I highly recommend the great (short) video here from MoMA (where the piece resides).
Also, I needed a refresher on mythical creatures. Minotaur = half human/half bull. Centaur = half human/half horse. I always get those confused!
AND...I've been thinking a lot about how this life journey is much less about acquiring things and much more about letting things go—shaving away all the not-you things until you become just yourself, and nothing else. Thanks so much for reading!
And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur
She sat like a queen woken
from a dream of flying.
Her father may have been defeated,
but that didn't stop her
from dressing in a crimson gown,
unleashing a sky full of bubbles.
You must learn to let go, she said.
Let your feelings rise like magic bubbles
then POP!
See them shimmer, disappear.
- Irene Latham
