Black Series: Poems - Tapa dura

In her remarkable Black Series, Laurie Sheck turns the ordinary world inside out and shows us its glittering seams. Her long, elegantly quizzical lines convey a haunted vision of human striving which is in part an elaboration on our daily reality, and in part a fantastic departure from it. “I can almost taste the glassy air,” she writes. “Where are the birds in it, / wings lifting as currents buffet them like echoes, bright / chaos of atomized instances . . . ?” Roaming freely in the shifting landscape of the imagination, Sheck delivers an inner life that is just as vivid as what we see around us; at the same time, she shows us what we see in a new light, bringing illumination even to darkness:

It’s the black night that wakes in me,
so dominant, so focused.
And then a car goes by and I think,
“I’m in the world,”
tires kicking up gravel from the dust.
What does the orange hawkweed do
inside this dark–its radiance
secretive but not extinguished?

To read this collection is to discover at every turn that secretive but undeniable radiance, and a language that is both riveting and distinctive.

Laurie Sheck is the author of three previous books of poetry, the most recent of which, The Willow Grove, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work appears widely in such journals and magazines as The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review and Boston Review. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, among other institutions, Sheck has been a member of the creative writing faculty at Princeton University and currently teaches in the M.F.A. program at the New School. She lives in New York City.