A BARER SKY

Serena Solin’s first full-length collection pulls from the pre-individual realm of birth and infancy, the collectivity into which we grow, and the narrow pathway in between. Drawing on sources from Dostoyevsky to Boyz n the Hood, Emerson to Olson, the Puritans to Honda Civics, Solin’s poems and essays ask what it means to write in a world of lush and violent textuality.

Serena Solin’s first book is a stellar accomplishment, a luminous elegy on loss that unfolds in inventive forms: There’s poetry of course, but also plays, essays, and anagrams. In conversation with poets and thinkers from Transcendentalism to the Language school, Solin reminds us of our collective grief as well as our collective strength. A Barer Sky proves that the complexity and heat of the tender heart pressed up against the cold cannot be extinguished. —BRENDA COULTAS

Apocalyptic, lychnoscopic, ecologic, and literally electric, Solin speaks what is impossible to say, in a poetry full of new locutions. —S. YARBERRY

A Barer Sky offers an astonishingly coherent analysis of the cracks and fissures threatening to splinter the individual and collective soul in a time of concussive losses. The truest form of a wave is the shape of its breaking, and the soul’s brokenness lets breath, spirit, and prosody pass through the scaffold of personhood, bringing what is beautiful and good about being human under any condition into the light. This book is that light. And the shadows that it inevitably casts. “Long before / the shape apprehends language,” Solin whispers into the perfect ear of an infant who will live out his perfect life in less than a week. By listening in to this intimate transmission at the brink, we drink in again and anew “the unearthly / cost of living in the living world.” —KENDRA SULLIVAN

To transverse “another mind” and be where “the last writing is the immortal child,” Solin’s ardent writing in these poems unfolds by a system of navigation where “all maps are partial” and all the destinations eventually leave or are left by “the realm of human contact.” Erasure and absence, the “lonely … impress upon the universal velvet,” lead the way to assured presence: “Tell me an angel / a trick of the eye.” These poems are clear and open-eyed. They approach a radical rupture in the order of daily life to introduce a rip in the fabric of being: look through it, there, to see what's beyond. —SARA ANN GILMORE