Sheila Black

Radium Dream Sheila Black

"In poems that beautify and destroy, Black's eighth book Radium Dream offers clear-eyed and equally complex conversations about the disabled body, family, violence, and the climate crisis. If, as Czeslaw Milosz writes, poetry is defined as 'a passionate pursuit of the real, ' then these poems pursue reality full force, from the girls who starve themselves to the women who ask 'why/so hard to love the only skin in which you will ever breathe?' The final coup (which, remember, means 'a blow') is the long poem at the end of the book, one memorializing another poet, a passionately loved mother, New Yorker. Using bits and pieces from Paul Celan poems and works by Rynn Williams, as well as Black's own acute eye for details of their shared city of New York, Black demonstrates the struggle for an answer to 'what in this world is there to love?'" - Connie Voisine, author of The Bower and Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize)

"'It is terrible to forget / you have a body, ' yet 'It is terrible / to have a body.' Therein lies one complex concern of this image-rich book; in what way do we recognize and resist the physical self? In tactile, textured poems this collection fluidly navigates the boundary between beauty and what is broken, between being wounded and the question 'what in this world is there to love?' Here is something to love: the honest, perceptive, insightful voice in Radium Dream that is wide-awake as it guides us through hurts and hungers, figs and fruit trees, subways and chicken wire. Around every corner we may find 'a new form of loneliness, ' but these poems invite readers, despite grief or loss, to connect to ourselves and to each other. Sheila Black's wonderful poems are embodied, fierce in clarity and direct in truth." - Laura Van Prooyen, author of Frances of the Wider Field