“The Book For You” —NPR, All Things Considered
In this new collection, Black explores the surprising interplay between mortality and money, between the next world and this one, between the language of disease and the language of finance. Following a beloved friend’s dying, these poems confront with stark emotion the aftermath, even as the outside world — the world of debts paid and collected, of power and dominion — intrudes. Hers is a look behind the curtain where exchanges are made, where deals mislead, doctors make decisions. How can profit and loss be measured, when the currency involved is love? Learn more…
The Descent, Sophie Cabot Black’s anticipated follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Misunderstanding of Nature, describes a restless spirit at the crossroads of love and damage, rapture and disenchantment, the mountain and the descent. “Heaven is only/What it cannot be”, one poem admits, but what is salvageable after a beloved departs, after the harrowing of personal and collective disaster, after language itself is revealed as inadequate? The voices of these poems struggle through the hesitancies of doubt and loss to end at more than survival or witness; they achieve clarity by singing of the resiliencies of the known world, after paradise inevitably fails. Learn more…
Sophie Cabot Black is an unabashedly passionate poet. Her language is exquisite, each word falling perfectly into precise structures of vision. Whether in a loose sonnet form or in a taut longer line, these poems are exercises in the extension of the soul. Learn more…
