Description: Katherine Soniat; poet, professor, and editor. She teaches in the University of North Carolina at Asheville's Great Smokies Writers Program and currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
This is one of my favorite poetry books of the year. Soniat has an amazing, even astonishing way of perceiving; images and metaphors just spin out of her as if she was weaving a web. Her way with imagery is so original, and she marries the concrete with the abstract with enormous skill. It's this ability to handle or evoke abstract ideas, without ever being didactic, that is one of the great charms of this volume. She is a serious poet, much under-rated in the contemporary scene, but a poet's poet. I've bee
I am in awe of Katherine Soniat's latest collection, Polishing the Glass Storm. Her poetic energies and talents are many and fierce mystery, imagination, story, knowledge, music and wonder. Here, the narrator wings us through birth, fear, sorrow, loss (including the loss of her own twin at birth) as she says, 'in love as I am with absence' as generations unfold and fold, in image and story. Some of those stories are 'soft ones, with feathers at the bottom,' told 'with the island nature of the mind.' Others
What does it mean to be human, to have infinite possibilities, to contain every creature you ever loved, to die, to have never existed, to change utterly from one breath to the next, and for it all to happen in a single moment, a moment that lasts forever? I love Katherine Soniat's willingness to live in the vastness of the questions of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol, evolutionary biology and quantum physics--and to ground her work in the specifics of individual historical experi