The Snow Arrow

Sharon Black's The Snow Arrow: Selected Poems stays with you. Voices of unsettling detachment, breathless obsession, and whimsical celebration take turns in this provocative volume spanning over four decades of the poet's career. Here, the everyday makes common cause with the absurd and nonsensical-real jockeying with surreal from stanza to stanza, line to line. Black's poems both comfort and confound. Snow, houses, and the elusive nature of the self are recurring, sometimes disquieting themes.

Early Praise:

Black's writing is both tightly disciplined and coyly whimsical. The world of these poems is a convincing one with its share of keen, if sometimes surreal observation. There is a loveliness in The Snow Arrow that, as much as it doesn't want to, sometimes hurts. At times there is also a sense of something not quite right, something off, not by a lot but by some metric of what it means to be human. These are poems in which you sometimes forget to breathe. In other places they are reminding you to breathe.

-JAMES CARPENTER, author, Honeyed Words and Bitter

Sharon Black, a Philadelphia area poet who I heard at Slought as part of the new Slought Fellows series, is a disarmingly humble poet whose works are homey and yet, like a home, surrounded by prickly brambles and some surprises inside and out. Black does some wonderful visual conjuring in her works, like in the love poem to her house in which she talks about how the house sits in the grass like a contented cow.

-ROBERTA FALLON, artist, art critic, co-founder of ArtBlog

From the wilds of suburban life, and, once, a career in the city, this poet is a wizard of startling language and stories. She shows us her sacred sauté pan and, the refusal of some onions to properly caramelize, /as if one could be persuaded by those that do. Visit her home where there are invisible handprints everywhere,/ even the floor from push-ups and cartwheels. Share her longing to be a cavernous ship from the last century / sunk on the bottom of the sea, / fish flitting from one appalling room / to the next, each in the most impeccable disorder. Open this debut book, smooth its pages, and prepare to be surprised, challenged, and charmed.

-AMY E. LAUB, author, Household Goods: Poems about Home