Product Details
- Publisher: Knopf (2021-08-10)
- Language: English
- Paperback: 112 pages
- ISBN-13: 9780593319505
- Item Weight: 368.55 grams
- Dimensions: 9.42 x 7.19 x 0.52 cm
Stunning poems of obsession, loss, and the desire for a renewed self, from the award-winning poet
“I thought I had left behind the darkness / of the heart,” Arvio confesses in the poem “Small War.” The love Arvio traces in these pages is indeed a battle, one in which the best-laid plans are shattered. Rarely has a poet tackled intimate love with so much invention and bravery.
In poem after poem, we meet the troubling lover whose nearness and force undoes her. There are moments of reprieve: “my naked body and budding pleasure / in the weather of your presence. / Not whether your presence but how.” The voice is vulnerable, self-knowing, often funny; the poet seems to be writing these poems to save herself from a devastating passion. Her weapons are a cascade of brash, freely spoken lines and a powerful command of metaphor, wielded in a search for meaning and understanding.
These breathtaking love poems make the collection Arvio’s most universal to date.
About the Author
SARAH ARVIO, the author of night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis, Sono: cantos, and Visits from the Seventh, and the translator of Federico García Lorca (Poet in Spain), is a recipient of the Rome Prize and the Bogliasco and Guggenheim Fellowships, among other honors. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has taught poetry at Princeton and Columbia. She lives in New York City.
