POLISHING THE GLASS STORM A Sequence by Katherine Soniat

A burb from D. Nurkse: author of A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems.

“What does it mean to be human, to have infinite possibilities, to contain every creature you ever loved, down to those who have never existed,…and have that happen in a single moment that lasts forever? I love Soniat’s willingness to live in the vast of the questions of Gllgamesh, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bardo, evolutionary biology and quantum physics—and then too to ground her work in the specifics of individual historical experience. Soniat has the audacity to create mythic language for the soul’s adventure which is utterly unguaranteed and adamantly open to the unknown…Polishing the Glass Storm is a departure for American poetry, masterful and visionary.”

I am delighted to see my new book from LSU Press just out. Pierce Jonassen did the fine cover. FOR MORE

Praise for Polishing the Glass Storm

I am in awe of Katherine Soniat’s latest collection, Polishing the Glass Storm. 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 or 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

— Dannye Powell, Charlotte, NC

What does it mean to be human, to have infinite possibilities, to contain every creature you ever loved, to die, to have never existed, to change utterly from one breath to the next, and for it all to happen in a single moment, a moment that lasts forever? I love Katherine Soniat’s willingness to live in the vastness of the questions of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol, evolutionary biology and quantum physics–and to ground her work in the specifics of individual historical experience. Soniat has the audacity to create a mythic language for the soul’s adventure that is utterly unguaranteed, adamantly open to the unknown: “Child, or whatever form of light you are, why point/to the bottom while the cranes fly high?” Polishing the Glass Storm is a new departure in American poetry, masterful and visionary.

— D. Nurkse, New and Selected Poems,  former poet laureate of Brooklyn, Human Right Activist

Katherine Soniat speaks like a mystic in her collection Polishing the Glass Storm. 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 of this sequence brush up against ‘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

The weathered grace of Katherine Soniat’s Polishing the Glass Storm is full of erudition and lived experience rendered into a personal mythology. These poems are transfigured legends of the self, aware, wry, sometimes tragic and always graceful, always rendering the deep hunger to know, be known, to see through the looking glass of the apparent to the deeper structures of an unstable and glorious world.

— David Lazar, Professor, Creative Writing, Columbia College Chicago