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.

'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