Winner of the 1997 Barnard New Women Poets Prize
As Brenda Hillman notes in her Introduction, Larissa Szporluk “creates an animate new universe out of cryptic original speech” in these poems. Exploring how the mind orders experience and how disorder, or different orders, affect that experience Szporluk has produced a poetry of alien beauty, limning worlds where the inability to exert control results in a disturbing, overwhelming immediacy.
“The best series currently introducing new writers to the public.” —Booklist
“How different this work is from the generic poetry of the day! Larissa Szporluk has created a new world of syntax and tone. Her poetry, free of narcissism and autobiography, indentured to the irrational and oblique, is made from a displaced language ‘shaking to remember where it had owned.’ I’ve missed this feral fineness in poetry—a clarity that is not watered-down slice of life but l’eau of stain and midnight: good strange. God Strange, too, for Szporluk is a religious poet, with her own indelible realm of awakening. Dark Sky Question arises from and speaks to the limbic portion of mind, that understory concerned with emotion and motivation, a heady linguistic space that remembers when the poem was ‘a cage whose interior flew.’“
—Alice Fulton, author of Dance Script with Electric Ballerina and Sensual Math
Praise for Larissa Szporluk
“Her effects are breathtaking.” —Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal
“Szporluk . . . weaves magic out of indeterminacy.” —Samuel Jay Keyser, Harvard Review
“If those two strange, haunted beings, Emily Dickinson and Georg Trakl, wedded, [Szporluk’s] poems might well be the offspring.” —Gregory Orr