now in presale
Solfrian’s new book is achingly alive—you’ll find David Ortiz, the jumbies, the couple with the Navy’s first same-sex kiss—and the stakes are intimate, visceral. Solfrian’s work is charged with immediacy. Every poem has the zing and edge of a buzzer shot or a spiritual practice; each line wants to transform the page, the reader, the speaker. Solfrian can follow a thread of sorrow until we emerge in ecstasy—or at least, ecstatic sorrow. Martin Buber speaks of reversal: the moment when your faith, instead of corroborating your aims, leads you to a world that’s the opposite of your expectations. That’s where Solfrian’s art lives. It’s poetry that makes everything happen.
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—D. Nurkse
Like Calder’s mobiles, Joanna Solfrian’s poems speak to the power of playful equipoise. She marshals one vivid line after another in confrontation, declaration, allusion, and sheer brio. Her poetry is compounded of the ageless ingredients—tenderness, wonder, life’s unmethodical wounds—which she conjures into real creations, poems that wake us up to the enormities that face us and the adroit rapture of art.
Baron Wormser
Joanna Solfrian’s second book, The Mud Room, is a masterpiece of the heart’s inquiry as to what makes a person whole, what grants identity in a damaged, resilient world. The voice, authentic and persuasive, behind these poems loves the complexity of our struggle to survive long goodbyes, fugitive seductions, and loss—and it invites the reader to do so too...This is a poet to celebrate, her poems to savor, a book for everyone to have on their nightstand.
Dzvinia Orlowski
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Readers will feel at home here, but they'll also feel ignited with new presences, keenly visible and invisible perceptions -- 'It is a gift, this light we carry in our lungs. . . . ' Cheers to Joanna Solfrian for a fine first book, the stunning deep breath of her voice.
Naomi Shihab Nye