Radium Dream
"In poems that beautify and destroy, Black’s eighth book Radium Dream offers clear-eyed and equally complex conversations about the disabled body, family, violence, and the climate crisis. If, as Czeslaw Milosz writes, poetry is defined as 'a passionate pursuit of the real,' then these poems pursue reality full force, from the girls who starve themselves to the women who ask 'why/so hard to love the only skin in which you will ever breathe?' The final coup (which, remember, means 'a blow') is the long poem at the end of the book, one memorializing another poet, a passionately loved mother, New Yorker. Using bits and pieces from Paul Celan poems and works by Rynn Williams, as well as Black’s own acute eye for details of their shared city of New York, Black demonstrates the struggle for an answer to 'what in this world is there to love?'" - Connie Voisine, author of The Bower and Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize)

"'It is terrible to forget / you have a body,' yet 'It is terrible / to have a body.' Therein lies one complex concern of this image-rich book; in what way do we recognize and resist the physical self? In tactile, textured poems this collection fluidly navigates the boundary between beauty and what is broken, between being wounded and the question 'what in this world is there to love?' Here is something to love: the honest, perceptive, insightful voice in Radium Dream that is wide-awake as it guides us through hurts and hungers, figs and fruit trees, subways and chicken wire. Around every corner we may find 'a new form of loneliness,' but these poems invite readers, despite grief or loss, to connect to ourselves and to each other. Sheila Black’s wonderful poems are embodied, fierce in clarity and direct in truth." - Laura Van Prooyen, author of Frances of the Wider Field
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Radium Dream
"In poems that beautify and destroy, Black’s eighth book Radium Dream offers clear-eyed and equally complex conversations about the disabled body, family, violence, and the climate crisis. If, as Czeslaw Milosz writes, poetry is defined as 'a passionate pursuit of the real,' then these poems pursue reality full force, from the girls who starve themselves to the women who ask 'why/so hard to love the only skin in which you will ever breathe?' The final coup (which, remember, means 'a blow') is the long poem at the end of the book, one memorializing another poet, a passionately loved mother, New Yorker. Using bits and pieces from Paul Celan poems and works by Rynn Williams, as well as Black’s own acute eye for details of their shared city of New York, Black demonstrates the struggle for an answer to 'what in this world is there to love?'" - Connie Voisine, author of The Bower and Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize)

"'It is terrible to forget / you have a body,' yet 'It is terrible / to have a body.' Therein lies one complex concern of this image-rich book; in what way do we recognize and resist the physical self? In tactile, textured poems this collection fluidly navigates the boundary between beauty and what is broken, between being wounded and the question 'what in this world is there to love?' Here is something to love: the honest, perceptive, insightful voice in Radium Dream that is wide-awake as it guides us through hurts and hungers, figs and fruit trees, subways and chicken wire. Around every corner we may find 'a new form of loneliness,' but these poems invite readers, despite grief or loss, to connect to ourselves and to each other. Sheila Black’s wonderful poems are embodied, fierce in clarity and direct in truth." - Laura Van Prooyen, author of Frances of the Wider Field
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Radium Dream

Radium Dream

by Sheila Black
Radium Dream

Radium Dream

by Sheila Black

Overview

"In poems that beautify and destroy, Black’s eighth book Radium Dream offers clear-eyed and equally complex conversations about the disabled body, family, violence, and the climate crisis. If, as Czeslaw Milosz writes, poetry is defined as 'a passionate pursuit of the real,' then these poems pursue reality full force, from the girls who starve themselves to the women who ask 'why/so hard to love the only skin in which you will ever breathe?' The final coup (which, remember, means 'a blow') is the long poem at the end of the book, one memorializing another poet, a passionately loved mother, New Yorker. Using bits and pieces from Paul Celan poems and works by Rynn Williams, as well as Black’s own acute eye for details of their shared city of New York, Black demonstrates the struggle for an answer to 'what in this world is there to love?'" - Connie Voisine, author of The Bower and Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize)

"'It is terrible to forget / you have a body,' yet 'It is terrible / to have a body.' Therein lies one complex concern of this image-rich book; in what way do we recognize and resist the physical self? In tactile, textured poems this collection fluidly navigates the boundary between beauty and what is broken, between being wounded and the question 'what in this world is there to love?' Here is something to love: the honest, perceptive, insightful voice in Radium Dream that is wide-awake as it guides us through hurts and hungers, figs and fruit trees, subways and chicken wire. Around every corner we may find 'a new form of loneliness,' but these poems invite readers, despite grief or loss, to connect to ourselves and to each other. Sheila Black’s wonderful poems are embodied, fierce in clarity and direct in truth." - Laura Van Prooyen, author of Frances of the Wider Field

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781915022110
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Publication date: 07/04/2022
Pages: 86
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone, Love/Iraq, Wen Kroy, winner of the Orphic Prize in Poetry, and Iron, Ardent. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently, All the Sleep in the World (Alabrava Press, 2021). Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Blackbird, The Birmingham Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), named a Notable Book for Adults for 2012 by the American Library Association. She received a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, for which she was selected by Philip Levine She is a co-founder of Zoeglossia, a non-profit to build community for poets with disabilities. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.
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