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Welcome to the Homepage for Katherine Soniat
This is the website of Katherine Soniat who is a poet, professor, and editor. She teaches in the University of North Carolina at Asheville's Great Smokies Writers Program and currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
The Swing Girl is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press (2011) and A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge was the runner-up
for The Orphic Prize, and is forthcoming from Dream Horse Press (2012).
Collections of Poetry by Katherine Soniat:
Listen to Katherine on Wordplay's "Laureate Hour" with NC Poet Laureate, Cathy Smith-Bowers
From AsheviileFM every Sunday afternoon at 5:00pm
**Please note: Be aware of lead-in music at beginning of the interview for three minutes and again between sections 1-2 and 2-3.
Comments
"A multi-faceted gem maker, Soniat has command of both lyric and narrative poetry. She can either capture the quick brushstrokes of a poem lyrically or tell its story. And like Robert Frost she knows stories are the path to any reader's heart. Soniat long ago left her apprenticeship and moved into a blacksmith shop of her own, where she continues to hammer out distinctive, striking poems. For she is a wordsmith, and this is necessary, poignant work. Indulge yourself."
—New Laurel Review
Poet David St. John Comments on Alluvial:
"Katherine Soniat's powerful new collection, Alluvial, charts the transforming courses of histories both public and private. Remarkably, she traces the patterns of what rises, falls and rises again through the passages of experience, as we watch storms of living sediment constellating--what settles and what is left, those residual nutrients of our futures--as the tides of our own lives subside. These voices and testimonies reflect how lives lived by water articulate both historically charged fluctuations. Soniat knows that life begins in water and that we all remain subject to water's constant reckonings. Alluvial is an inspired collection of poems."
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Novelist and poet Fred Chappell on Cracking Eggs:
"These poems are haunted by possibilities in lost time that become hauntings of our present difficulties. Few poets are so intimate as she or so appreciative of the reader's intuitions."
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Novelist and poet Jay Parini on A Shared Life:
"This is one of those rare collections that one hopes to revisit, again and again, in the years ahead. There is a rueful wisdom here, an achievement of emotional clarity that informs the poems, stabilizes them, makes them shine from the inside out."
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Poet Josephine Jacobson on A Shared Life:
"Soniat's work is remarkable for its combination of control and force, deceptively clear in tone-- the depths and complexities are all there under the lucid style. She is an excellent poet, original by nature of her work, rather than by strained effort."
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Comment on Notes of Departure by poet Sonia Sanchez:
"A welcome breath in the arena of American poetry. Her voice has great vitality. Clarity. Perceptiveness and beauty. This woman. Poet. Exhaling her words. And we smile our lives in return!"
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