Congratulations to Katherine Soniat for her new poetry collection Polishing the Glass Storm, published by LSU Press. Described as a “riveting sequence of verse,” Soniat’s language delves into the relationship between vision and experience.
I am in awe of Katherine Soniat’s latest collection… 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 are so tactile and gripping, they were surely written with the narrator’s bare knuckles r the bear’s “warm saliva,” leaving the reader “freshly skinned and slick…” This collection captivates, energizes and charms. I’ll return to it again and again.
dannye Romine powell, author of in the sunroom with raymond carver
Katherine Soniat currently teaches in the University of North Carolina at Asheville’s Great Smokies Writers Program. She has published numerous collections and chapbooks, many of which have received awards. Among them are the Camden Poetry Prize, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and a Virginia Prize for Poetry. To learn more about her, visit her website.
Katherine Soniat speaks like a mystic in her collection… She travels a landscape of mythology and memory to explore the mystery of existence in “thin places” where there is an overlap between the living and the dead. The prismatic poems o this sequence b rush up agains the “intimacy of time” like “bees in a crazed terrarium.” Soniat displays her mastery as a poet while introducing us to many selves in this marvelous collection of poems.
alison pelegrin, author of our lady of bewilderment
Soniat’s poems “Sister Feather” and “Knees” appeared in Issue 14 of Superstition Review.
To purchase Polishing the Glass Storm, go here.
