Sophia Dahlin, Glove Money

 

 

THAT’S MY WEAKNESS NOW

I’m well known throughout the co-ops for being a splashy dishwasher,
and I’m well known in the suburbs for singing to the mayor’s daughter. 

Wine is cheaper than books unless you drink it by the bowlful.
I need books hand over hand and my hands are soulful. 

Softer than a cloud in a child’s rhyme, your dainty cleaning after love.
Softer than the edges of a fan’s blades furred with dust. 

You speak intimate universes to your listeners, then make moue.
Surely no one since Boop has winced at fierier triumphs than Sophia.

The latest from Berkeley poet and editor Sophia Dahlin is Glove Money (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), a follow-up to her full-length debut, Natch (San Francisco CA: City Lights, 2020). “obviously I am a child of language,” she writes, to open the poem “LIFE STUFF,” “for I think I am a child of nature / raised on words I believe I was raised in a green pasture / having ideas about goats, ideas about sheep / yet literally never in my life having been beside a sheep of any color / temperament or texture, sure though of its woolly heft and fecal odor [.]” There is a lushness to these poems, monologues extended and compact, propelled and performative, offering gestures, agency and an urgency that feels more forceful, even grounded, through being spoken in hushed tones. “I come sore my immediate waters,” she writes, as part of the short poem “RIVERR PONDR LAKER SEAR,” “run drawing out these previous waters / I wish rivers of cum didn’t all connect / but glad you can’t step in it twice / the water’s always changing [.]” These poems are insistent, immediately present and confident, witty and even dangerous, such as the poem “SHE’S GOT A HABIT,” that includes: “I’m the schmuck receiving warning, // and I’m the predatory lesbian / promising oral understand to / the girls at karaoke. / But I’m unbelievable, / I croon to him / ‘You’ll be the lonely one’ and I mean // me, the dizzy cook, who bites / the tops off / carrots, swaps recipes mid- / bake, spins in the pan / to check the oil’s hot.” And I can’t imagine there are too many poems that weave together karaoke, cooking, oral sex, a reference to John Lennon and a phrase by Canadian poet Lisa Robertson (and that’s only on the first page of this particular five page ride). Pay attention to Sophia Dahlin: this collection really is something glorious to behold.

Farid Matuk, Moon Mirrored Indivisible

  

To stay inside the blind’s slat light, words
Would touch paper, a jar, the smell of the laid upon 

By foundations, the same steady, wide sunlight 

Cut through at the bottom

By busy diesel routes and my citizen skin
Walking around dares beheading 

In a recruitment video      Then the outrage comes
To make a story of the tool, 

When it’s just an iteration of sky

Piled with tactical flight paths (“Perfect Day”)

It is very good to see a new book by American poet Farid Matuk, his Moon Mirrored Indivisible (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2025), although frustrating to realize I’m a book behind, having missed The Real Horse (Tucson AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2018), but catching This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010) and My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta Press, 2013). Set in four numbered sections of short, sharp lyrics, Matuk’s poems offer an exactness of first-person exposition and exploration, seeking out points along the long line of experience through the world and how it works, or doesn’t entirely work the way it should. “So, we’re at the edge / Of this visibility regime?” writes the six-line poem “Show Up,” “Maybe two inches back / A little and aging // Against it we’re told to repeat / Our dissonance and lack of closure [.]” Matuk works through his lyrics writing collision of narration and image, offering observation and commentary, and the occasional mirror. “I want to talk to you about happiness to stay inside it,” opens the poem “Before That,” “But boys displaced by proxy war are falling onto gravel / Outside my window, under the police helicopter’s searchlight // The gravel bites through to the knees; the searchlight is a thing / The bars on the windows are promised to // And the wisdom of the body, like articulations // Of capital through time, means some things / But not others [.]”

Edging his circle of subject matter beyond the immediate domestic and fatherhood of some of that earlier work, the ripples of this current collection still hold at that central core, but move further out into the world, attempting a declarative staccato across a firm lyric, something that has long been present within his work. “Porno Clydesdale leadership pony totems,” begins the poem “Form & Freight,” “On fire    sons would be    Bid us prance / Tamp this scrub grass to come up    in sparkler light, / Branching into three or four points at the ends, every time [.]” In clear tones, Matuk articulates his observations across an increasingly hostile culture, from within an America ramped up in rhetoric, domestic terror and foreign wars, and even the purpose of poetry across such divides. “However mannered,” he writes, as part of “Concentric,” “the poem dares // Write about the poem / I’m fool enough to say it flattens [.]”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sid Ghosh

Sid Ghosh is a levitator of language, meandering through the rivers of Down Syndrome, gilling himself through poetry. He is the author of two chapbooks: Give a Book and Proceedings of the Full Moon Rotary Club. His full-length debut is Yellow Flower Gills Me Whole. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I am a poet. So getting here is a life flow situation, I think. 

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I mostly keep some amorous tether to the wisdom inherent in volumes of books living in me. 

4 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Amorous tether lets me be quick. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
So freeing to interact with a live audience. Settles me. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Why answer when you can ask! 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Really freeing the public’s mind. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Want final say. But editor is essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Foster your inner poet. Write. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Mother, asters, lakes that flow, amorous tethers, yaks, math. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Tarragon. 

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Still poetry, asters, lichen, lakes that flow, winds that rest.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Herman Hesse. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Love, live, laugh. 

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Fermenter. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Chris Martin and Mother. 

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
All X-Men. 

19 - What are you currently working on?
Sufi poetry. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Gina Myers, Works & Days

 

Everybody’s working for the weekend
Unless you’re working for the Clampdown
The Jam sing, If we tell you that you got two days to live
Then don’t complain
John Maynard Keynes thought that technology
Would advance enough to give us
A 15-hour workweek
And David Graeber pointed out that it probably has

The latest from Philadelphia poet Gina Myers [see my review of her prior collection here] is the book-length suite, Works & Days (Philadelphia PA: Radiator Press, 2025), a collection that plays off the dailyness and immediate title of Works and Days (New York NY: New Directions, 2016) by the late American poet Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022). Instead of articulating the dailyness of being, Myers works through, as Marie Buck offers in their back cover blurb, “[…] all the hours we’ve lost to working; it also registers the continuous urge to want more from life than just sustaining oneself with a paycheck.” “Once I commit to writing a long poem about work,” Myers writes, near the end of the collection, “I decide to read a number of books about work / And this too becomes work, thankless and unpaid / And it begins to make me feel worse / And I begin to dread the work of reading about work [.]”

There has been an interesting anti-capitalist work poetry emerging from Philadelphia for some time, centred, as my awareness provides, around the work of Myers and Ryan Eckes [see my review of his latest here], offering a kind of continuation of the 1970s “work poetry” ethos worked through by Canadian poets Tom Wayman, Kate Braid, Erín Moure and Phil Hall, and furthered by poets including the late Vancouver poet Peter Culley (1958-2015) and other elements of The Kootenay School of Writing (Wayman being one of the founders), to more recent examples, whether Vancouver poet Michael Turner (think Company Town, for example), Chicago poet Andrew Cantrell or Vancouver poet Ivan Drury [see my review of his full-length debut here]. Whereas those early Vancouver days of “work poetry” championed the idea that labour was worth articulating as literary subject matter, an idea that evolved through poets such as language-specific interrogations and pro-labour criticisms of capitalist culture—leaning into the work of poets such as Jeff Derksen, Louis Cabri, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Clint Burnham, Colin Smith, ryan fitzpatrick and others—Myers employs numerous of those same threads with the added flavour of general frustrations, one that I know she shares with numerous other writers (few who ever discuss such in their writing): the mere fact that requiring employment takes time away from actually writing.

And yet—I tell myself I am unlearning productivity
Then I found out I have to have surgery
And will be off work for a couple of weeks
I ask for recommendations of movies and TV shows
To watch and make stacks of books to read
I think maybe I’ll finally work on that essay
That has been kicking around in my head
Or write a book review or two
Things I enjoy doing but have felt too depleted
By work in recent years to work outside of work
When it is time for me to return to work
I feel like a failure even though I know it is wrong
I was not productive at all as my body healed
And I slept entire days away

Not everyone holds the same physical requirements, the same mental load, for employment, which can allow for a very different level of post or pre-work energy. We all know about Frank O’Hara working poems during his lunch break, Dr. William Carlos Williams sketching upon prescription pads, or Toronto poet bpNichol, who used to compose his thoughts directly into a tape machine, during his long commutes from downtown Toronto to his lay-work at Therafields. Vancouver poet George Stanley composed a long poem while commuting around on BC Transit. Minneapolis poet Mary Austin Speaker composed The Bridge (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], her accumulation of untitled, stand-alone poems as she made her daily commute across New York’s Manhattan Bridge. I also know of writers too exhausted to even think about writing, once they leave the physical threshold of work.

In a cohesive collection of accumulated, first-person lyric interrogations, Myers writes on writing and work. She writes on writing and not writing, and offering her best energies and time to what she cares less about than other elements of her life, and of wanting to keep her writing life and writing time separate from ideas of “product,” a notion she feels enough pressure, put upon through capitalism, to resist. “It turns out when I wasn’t writing” she offers, “I still filled notebooks with words / But I didn’t think it counted / Because there wasn’t a product to show [.]” Myers writes of fear and of silence, and of being too tired to think about writing, despite such fervent wish to get to the page. She writes of her own expectations, and through capitalism and propaganda, wasted time and work-speak, reminiscent of the corporate-speak that Canadian expat Syd Zolf examined through their own full-length collection, Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007), attempting to turn a dehumanizing language back in upon itself. Simultaneously many-layered and straightforward, these poems are very different than how Bernadette Mayer might have approached the same subject matter. One might say the world is different now, certainly, as Myers pushes her lyric far deeper into a critique on capitalism, and a study around how writing gets made, among and between the requirements and expectations of full-time employment.

This is the fear: that we go through our lives unable to do
The things most important to us, everyone making demands of our time
The working condition says there will never be time enough
When you think you’ve made it, it’s too late
Or as the Dead Kennedys say in “At My Job”:
Thank you for your service and a long career
Glad you gave us your best years

 

Jane Shi, echolalia echolalia

I’m intrigued by the long sentence, sentences, that stitch together to form Vancouver poet Jane Shi’s full-length debut, echolalia echolalia (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), a collection that follows her debut chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Vancouver BC: Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022). Stretching across the length and breadth of the one hundred and twenty compact pages of her debut collection, hers is a remarkable extended thought across lyric meditation and formal invention writing the body, loss, nostalgia and layers not simply reconsidered, but recycled, repurposed. “a tide-pool winter a hiss / of hot violets little fibres / along my bedspread brush of threaded grass / in the grubby broken cinema of memory scrub / my back filthily in the thick sublunary lust / starts would make canyons o me the vast valleys / airless marshes where travellers stumbled,” she writes, to open the poem “worship the exit light,” a poem subtitled “A found poem created / from my wordpress poetry journal / of my late teens (2008-2016) [.]”

Across five sections of lyrics that offer visual and language play—“Unreliable NarReader,” “griefease,” “picture/que,” “The Organization” and “ECHOLALIA AS A SECOND LANGUAGE”—Shi offers poems as declaration, observation, visual reference, restraint and expansive gesture, study notes; as points of clarity, both to the reader and herself. “You offer to run him over with your wheelchair.” begins the poem prose sequence “I’ll Dial Your Number,” a sequence that counts down in reverse order, starting with five. “I come to you deceived and smelling of fish oil. You pat my back with your hospital-gown grin. It’s so soft I cackle. I cough him out tat the rate of decomposing newspapers.” Her lyric is delightfully witty, even absurd, and subversive, articulating through her exploratory gestures an underlying loss that layers, ripples, the more one moves away from those points of origin. Listen, for example, to the opening of the poem “then you put missing them in your calendar,” that begins:

after tax season you stare at the gingko leaf lines of your excel sheet. long bridges dull linger of lullabies. until. you pause at each last lantern lit desk doorknob dusk grip laptop foxglove-covered drawer. open it to sort through documents you were too tired to sort through last winter. return to each drawstring/word dock/sticky note: another year, gone. smoke in song-shadow, milk candle rehearsal. you light things up to shimmer chimney what they’ll say when they hear you. you light things up till your steps are in step with theirs through history’s afterword.

These are such lovely visual and gestural sweeps, such as the poem “I want to face consequences,” which begins with and leads into such an expansive swirl across the page, one of a number of such she composes throughout: “17 / years / old, and / still throwing / tantrums, the suburban / problem so specifically / misdiagnosed / as the problem / of picky eating, on a sunday 10 / years later she’ll check / into a resignation hostel, become / an audible ghost, beckon a make-believe / social worker to arrive at her pillowside like a tooth / fairy.” There’s a coming-of-age or coming-into-being element to these poems, but one far more self-aware and wry, more playful, than most examples I’m aware of, providing a sense of exploration and wonder, collaging observation with cultural and pop culture references, and what one carries no matter where one lands, such as the poem “is it literature or deforestation?,” that includes:

you imagine her in the faces of others: you see the mogui of race in the crowds of this too-Asian campus: so you emptied yourself of what they saw as competition: remaining useless so you no longer needed needing: years later he will Gwen Stefani another sidekick: she will have the same name as you: will get another chance to pay respects: stilling a compass of coincidence: had a knife fight in the Uwajimaya parking lot: not a shell (not a shell): you belong to shoe polish: you belong to gavel polish: goodbye 2014: your legs froze: your throat thawed: you ripped up their contract: refused to take hush money: god/dess of mercy smiling through the paragraphs: ghosts: historians: hesitations: scrawled hi: hello: the caramel salt sting: sigh: wont be long now

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mia Kang

Mia Kang is the author of All Empires Must (Airlie Press, 2025), which won the 2023 Airlie Prize, and the chapbooks Apparent Signs (Ghost City Press, 2024) and City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020). Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, wildness, and elsewhere. Named the 2017 winner of Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest, she has also received awards and residencies from Brooklyn Poets, the Academy of American Poets, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Millay Arts, and University of the Arts. Whatever prizes she has won, she paid for three-fold in submission fees. www.miaadrikang.com

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My recent book All Empires Must is my first full-length, and I'm not sure if its publication has changed my life. My main feelings toward its release have to do with the strangeness of being nearly a decade removed from the process of writing it. The years I spent working on those poems (2015-2017), however, certainly changed my life. It was my first experience working on a project at that scale, and it was also my deepest experience with writing to date, in the sense that I discovered how an immersive conceptual engagement could process personal experience into something else. I think the book is more serious, maybe braver, than what I've written since, but it's also less honest, or self-accountable. I guess that's the description of being young.

The best way of describing the difference between my recent work and my previous is probably to say I have become less precious about poetry. Part of that is that I've become less ambitious, in the sense of some external idea of "achievement" as a writer. I want to be serious, but I do not want to be prestigious, which I desperately did want when I was younger. That allows me to be looser, to try more varied approaches, and to let things take the time they take.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

As a kid, I actually tried to write fiction first. But I could never get a story to go anywhere. I would get mired in description. Plot held no interest for me. When I first started getting serious about poetry, after I moved to NYC in my late teens, I also tried to write non-fiction intermittently. I could only really do it in email form. There's a trove of long emails I wrote to family members from the years I was 17 and 18, plus a bunch I wrote to a mainly email-based lover the years I was 18 through 20 or so. But I've never succeeded in connecting with the essay as a form for my own thinking. I have the vague memory––possibly fabricated––of my first poems being written on scraps of paper. Poetry writing, in that sense, was easier to hide. Haha. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Total variety. I tend to start from some kind of fixation. I've probably grown more attuned over the years to what kind of fixation might be likely to hold up as the basis for writing and what might not, but I still get surprised. I think I used to be closer to writing on a day-to-day basis; I used to find that first lines or sticking phrases would pop up and I would go from there. Since having my relationship to reading and writing completely reconfigured by various engagements with institutions (that's the avoidant way of saying graduate school), I've had to work much harder to make space for language to show itself. I'm not very disciplined about it, frankly, and sometimes I feel bad about that.

The poems in All Empires Must often came in a single sitting, but each poem (and the book as a whole) was at one point or another completely taken apart, edited, and reformulated. Some of the early drafts would eventually kind of splice into each other and become different poems. My second manuscript (unpublished, titled PERISH / ABOLISH) arrived more intact––individual poems still required refinement, but not in the same "down to the studs" kind of way. More of the thinking was done exterior to the poetry, in the second book. Also I was really, really, really angry all the time. Poems would get spit out in an already hardened state.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I guess I jumped the gun and answered the first part of this above. I'm always thinking in terms of projects, whether the project is a "book" or something else. I can't stomach the notion of a poem that stands alone.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Still trying to figure this out! I do enjoy readings, kind of. I like the physical act of reading aloud, and I'm interested in the thing that can happen when that happens with an audience. However, I am also someone who finds it hard to track a poem when I'm listening to it being read aloud. I greatly prefer reading from the page. I know not everyone is like that, but it always makes me feel weird about reading publicly myself.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Yes. What is writing? Why am I doing this? Who am I doing it for? What does writing do?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

See questions in answer above.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I can't say that I've had too much experience working with an outside editor on poetry. With my first chapbook, City Poems, I got some great edits from the folks at ignitionpress. There was one long poem in particular that they helped me refine over several versions. At the time, I hated the process, but it absolutely made the book better, and I think I would be much more appreciative of that kind of editing now. I wish I had had the chance to work with an editor on All Empires Must. It won a book contest, so it was published basically exactly as I submitted it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I don't know if I think it's the best piece of advice, but it's the first thing that comes to mind: don't give up on a piece until you've gotten 100 rejections. Sadly, much about publishing is a numbers game, given the total lack of infrastructure for poetry.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Alas, I have no routine. My day begins with feeding cats and making coffee. From there it unravels.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

To writers and books I love. I'll reread the poetry books that have been most important to my writing life. I'll especially turn to the work of dear friends. But also, and maybe more importantly, I need to go outside of writing. Learning something new helps, as does engaging with the material world (cooking, gardening, cleaning). Visual and performance art have often been the things that get what's stuck to move.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Copal. 

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

My study of art history has run alongside my writing since the beginning, I guess. Architecture moves me more than probably any other visual form. Watching and thinking about and sometimes making dance and performance have been central to my writing as well.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Wayyyyy too many to name, so I'll just say Cam Scott because everybody knows it already.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

You're catching me in August, and I've been to a lot of baseball games recently. I really, really want to be able to walk on the field at the Phillies' ballpark, with few or no other people on it. Maybe this is the memory of the proscenium; I just feel I need to experience this.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I'm a nonprofit administrator, occupation-wise. I'm also qualified as an art historian, though I'm not teaching much these days due to the terrible conditions of that occupation. I'm working toward sitting for a CPA license. I wish I could be an NBA player (I have never played basketball at all). I estimate I will attempt 5-7 more occupations before I die. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I do many things else. Mainly else. I started my life as a dancer, and I got injured. Writing is less expensive than say, painting, which I have no talent for anyway. Language is a source of pleasure and the stupidest kind of cage (the one you make yourself!). Everything is writing.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The last great book was Emily Skillings' second book, Tantrums in Air, which came out recently from The Song Cave. I first read it in manuscript form over a year ago, and it is beyond fantastic and everyone should read it. I barely watch movies. The last great film I watched was probably Scarface, because I watch it once or twice a year, and I don't think Center Stage (with which I maintain a similar schedule) counts as a great film.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am working on a book tentatively titled Rookie of the Year. The book centers around a long, overdetermined metaphor between my failed engagement and the so-called Process, the strategy by which the Philadelphia 76ers have been trying to build a team and win a championship since 2013. I'm still early on in the project, but I think the book is really about the beauty of devotion and the incongruity of the devastation by which it is accompanied. Several basketball-related poems from the project have appeared on The Rights to Ricky Sanchez podcast over the past year or so. None of these are published in a normal way yet, but you can hear Spike Eskin read "Breach of Promise," or you can see me give a live performance on the occasion of the NBA Draft Lottery. I have a lot of problems. Daryl Morey, please give me a press pass so I can write this book.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Prageeta Sharma, Onement Won

 

Secular Ornament

Throughout this fallen fall into a diminished winter

with its ten thousand upturned leaves,
its impervious starlight for which I was given sight to look up, Upa,
having perceived the mind,
in an imperceptible 

snowed-in shadow. A demarcated yellow.

I was giving a future to breathe in. 

I am still discussing what traumas won’t shake.

Could they lessen in time? 

Why do you think I am with him because he is at peace with himself
and brings his peace to me. 

There is incalculable value in the quiet night of nonviolent affairs.

The latest poetry title by American poet Prageeta Sharma, her sixth, is Onement Won (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025), a follow-up to her devastating Grief Sequence (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], a collection that wrote on and reacted to the loss of her husband due to cancer. As she wrote: “These are the facts: I lost my husband, composer and artist Dale Edwin Sherrard, on January 14, 2015, after his fight with esophageal cancer. // This is the fact and narrative, my obituary of his dying days, his death days.” This new collection is dedicated to her mother, and to her second husband, the photographer Michael Stussy, both of whom passed in 2023. As the press release for Onement One offers: “Having been twice widowed to cancer, Sharma questions the various relationships—familial, social, romantic, religious—that have shaped her identity.” How does one continue across such a length of grief? Or, as the poem “Metaphorically Challenged” begins: “I meant well and resisted comparisons / for a while because those who might cajole / me into finding their inaccuracy accurate / need likenesses. I was meant to find myself inside a metaphor / but I wasn’t there and felt disillusioned.”

“This is about coming back to oneself. // No Ram Dass. No Be Here Now. // No Om of sitting in place.” she writes, early in Onement One. “This is about size and succumbing.” Across such long and languid sentences that extend the page in sequence, and poems that extend across distances and into each other, Sharma writes through and around grief, and what might follow; what might emerge from such a heft of death and loss and ash. Sharma composes lyric meditations on grief and beyond grief, writing lost friendships and navigating such strange, foreign and familiar territories. “I want to feel more sentient,” she writes, as part of the poem “Sunday, Sunday,” “I say to the blankets and to the neurological / labor I hope to integrate. // I don’t want the ingestible lyric of my body to blindfold me. / I do wonder what David Lynch has learned from the Upanishads.” Given the extensive lyric explorations of her stunning prior collection, as well, how does one follow grief with grief? Or, as the poem “Long-Term Intimacy and Terminal Illness” ends:

Your body is working so hard to endure these days
and my body feels the sad ache of new melancholia 

for what is coming, for what is being taken away by fate,
and what of our hearts that become capacities of secular possession.