Collections of Poetry
"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."
► The Swing Girl, Louisiana State University Press (2011)
** For more information and purchasing, please visit The Swing Girl page by clicking here
“The poems in Katherine Soniat’s new collection, The Swing Girl, weave emotion’s ‘spray going farther than thought’ with the ‘bedrock things’ of the trod-upon world. These poems eddy and pool in unpredictable and often surprising ways, much as the mind moves in its twilight state between waking and sleep. The fluidity of their cadence and the luminosity of their imagery carry the reader to the wellspring of poetry itself, that deep delight of which Robert Penn Warren spoke, whose source is, in Soniat’s words, ‘beauty on its way to being mystery.’”
► The Firesetters: (Online Chapbook Series from The Literary Review and Web del Sol)
 ► Alluvial: (Bucknell University Press)
"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."
► A Shared Life: (University of Iowa Press)
"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."
"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."
 ► Cracking Eggs: (University Presses of Florida)
"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."
 ► Winter Toys: (a chapbook, Green Tower Press)
 ► Notes of Departure: (Walt Whitman Center for the Arts and Humanities
"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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PUBLICATIONS