Orbit: Poems (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780451494726)

With Orbit, prize-winning author Cynthia Zarin confirms her place as an indispensable American poet of our time.

In this, her fifth collection, Zarin turns her lyric lens on the worlds within worlds we inhabit and how we navigate our shared predicament--the tables of our lives on which the news of the day is strewn: the president speaking to parishioners in Charleston, the ricochet of violence, near and far. Whether writing about hairpin turns in the stair of childhood, about the cat's claw of anxiety, on the impending loss of a young friend, or how "love endures, give or take," here is the poet who, in the title poem, "bartered forty summers for black pearls" and whose work is full of such wagers, embodied in playing cards, treble notes, snow globes, and balancing acts. Zarin reminds us that the atmosphere created by our experiences shapes and defines the orbit we move through. Along the way, she is both witness and, often indirectly, subject--"I do not know how to hold the beauty and sorrow of my life," she writes. This book is an attempt at an answer.

Author: Cynthia Zarin
ISBN-10: 0451494725
ISBN-13: 9780451494726
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Language: English
Published: 03/07/2017
Pages: 96
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.50h x 6.00w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 02/01/2017 pg. 84