Traci O’Dea has created an omnivorous idiom, able to digest anything from slang to sophisticated allusion. Waving has it all—short and taut lines, long and loping lines, middle-length lines from which she weaves immaculate sonnets, and everything with such depths that it “tugs like undertow.” She is the poet I have been looking for, the poet who is equally adept with the aural and visual aspects of a poem. Her work has the sonorousness of formal verse and the scenic delights of verse libre. She really is the lover of both drummers and painters. If any poet can heal the poetic divide, she is the one.

—Aaron Poochigian, author of American Divine, winner of the Richard Wilbur Award

O'Dea's poetry is evocative, illuminating, modern, and fierce. She displays such perfect juxtaposition between the natural world and the personal world inside us all. Her words are at once beautiful, original, searingly honest and at times haunting. She guts the human condition and serves it up warm, still breathing on the page.

—Sophie Cousens, New York Times best-selling author of This Time Next Year

The vulnerable, undefended body may be lost in the waves of time and tide and cultural expectation, but the imagination may rise above those waters...beach reading of the thrilling sort.

—Lee Upton, author of Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles

Traci Lynn O'Dea's Waving is a meditation on the body and the universal sea, of letting go and letting be, as preoccupied with the spiritual as the physical. In it, a glossy stripe on a beach is first a watch, then a minnow – the body's breath echoes and the lover lowers herself in the September sea. This is a collection that seeks the quiet liminal spaces between the surf and the shore, those moments of contemplation before the relentless waves return.

—Richard Georges, author of Epiphaneia, winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature