Publications

Praise for Starfish Wash-Up

Like any three foils -- Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras; Sethe, Denver, and Beloved -- Ann Pedone's The Medea Notebooks, Katherine Soniat's Starfish Wash-Up, and D. M. Spitzer's overflow of an unknown self: a song of songs each appears more clearly as itself in the dramatic tension created by its connection with the other two. Each tenders its own wisdom, each ventures its own way, each savors its own wanting, yet the three harmonize not only because they share such features as telling the poet's own story in and as a shared story, but also because they share the quality that, characterizing genius, Marina Tsvetaeva called "the highest degree of subjection to the visitation": for Pedone "There are experiences / that break us open"; for Soniat "Entanglements drag us through time"; for Spitzer "an unknown source blooms & overflows us."  Because Ann Pedone, Katherine Soniat, and D. M. Spitzer have subjected themselves to the visitation, The Medea Notebooks, Starfish Wash-Up, and overflow of an unknown self are visitations, subjection to which any reader will experience as gift and illumination.

-- H. L. Hix, Demonstrategy

What, in a human's life, is beyond human control? Fate is. These three poetic sequences render the experience of overpowering human emotion--rage, longing, sexual desire--in combat or in consonance with forces beyond reason. Each work shatters the vessel of a classical story and rearranges its shards into forms suited to our age. Ann Pedone's The Medea Notebooks alternates confession, reportage and text messages. Katherine Soniat's Starfish Wash-Up traces the search for the lost parent in language shimmering between the lyric and the mystical, sweeping with centripetal force elements of history, ecology, and the fate of the earth into its whirlwind. D.M. Spitzer's overflow of an unknown self: a song of songs, wields overlapping syntactical constructions and ambiguities of gender and identity to articulate desire breaching all boundaries. To read these transmutations of ancient texts epitomizing our most anarchic appetites is to feel intimately how beholden the human remains to its fate.

-- Gyorgyi Voros, Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Praise for Polishing the Glass Storm

I am in awe of Katherine Soniat's latest collection, Polishing the Glass Storm. Her poetic energies and talents are many and fierce mystery, imagination, story, knowledge, music and wonder. Here, the narrator wings us through birth, fear, sorrow, loss (including the loss of her own twin at birth) as she says, 'in love as I am with absence' as generations unfold and fold, in image and story. Some of those stories are 'soft ones, with feathers at the bottom,' told 'with the island nature of the mind.' Others are so tactile and gripping, they were surely written with the narrator's bare knuckles or the bear's 'warm saliva,' leaving the reader 'freshly skinned and slick... .' This collection captivates, energizes and charms. I'll return to it again and again."--Dannye Romine Powell, author of In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver

-- Dannye Powell, Charlotte, NC

What does it mean to be human, to have infinite possibilities, to contain every creature you ever loved, to die, to have never existed, to change utterly from one breath to the next, and for it all to happen in a single moment, a moment that lasts forever? I love Katherine Soniat's willingness to live in the vastness of the questions of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol, evolutionary biology and quantum physics--and to ground her work in the specifics of individual historical experience. Soniat has the audacity to create a mythic language for the soul's adventure that is utterly unguaranteed, adamantly open to the unknown: "Child, or whatever form of light you are, why point/to the bottom while the cranes fly high?" Polishing the Glass Storm is a new departure in American poetry, masterful and visionary.

-- D. Nurkse, New and Selected Poems,  former poet laureate of Brooklyn, Human Right Activist

Katherine Soniat speaks like a mystic in her collection Polishing the Glass Storm. She travels a landscape of mythology and memory to explore the mystery of existence in 'thin places' where there is an overlap between the living and the dead. The prismatic poems of this sequence brush up against 'the intimacy of time'  like 'bees in a crazed terrarium.' Soniat displays her mastery as a poet while introducing us to many selves in this marvelous collection of poems.

-- Alison Pelegrin, author of Our Lady of Bewilderment

The weathered grace of Katherine Soniat's Polishing the Glass Storm is full of erudition and lived experience rendered into a personal mythology. These poems are transfigured legends of the self, aware, wry, sometimes tragic and always graceful, always rendering the deep hunger to know, be known, to see through the looking glass of the apparent to the deeper structures of an unstable and glorious world.

-- David Lazar, Professor, Creative Writing, Columbia College Chicago

Praise for Bright Stranger

"Shield your eyes as you read Katherine Soniat's Bright Stranger. The light often blinds in these mysterious, incantatory poems. It nearly keens, if shimmer can be said to have sound.

Soniat has discovered a way to account for everything and, in so doing, wrought a language that lusciously abides in her venerated natural world, but also explores like a medium the barely apprehended liminal ether that surrounds it. Indeed, she traipses like Eurydice (a haunting presence throughout this volume) with equal grace and bravado between realms, reconciling the earth upon which we walk with the fading apparitions of the past "the old decline of flesh that shifts / to language."

These poems thrum with exquisite voltage."

-- Joseph Bathanti, previous Poet Laureate of North Carolina

"In Katherine Soniat's gorgeous new collection, Bright Stranger, the story of Orpheus and his lost love Eurydice threads its golden weave through strata of dream, myth, and math to create shimmering layers of language and logic. 

The auras of summer grasses form "plump geometries" of light...Euclid's "constellations of lines, rays, and segments" represent "Certainties only the mind concocts."  In poems of exquisite detail, a speaker--daughter, wife, mother, traveler--journeys through the "Clips of a life" knowing this inexorable fact, that "we'll not pass this way again."  

Bright Stranger is stunning poetry."

-- Cynthia Hogue, author of Revenance

"Katherine Soniat's Bright Stranger revitalizes nature's panorama in all its wondrous, dirt-streaked glory.  In Soniat's world, wolves and condors can taste our blood, and we can feel the furred heat of being human isolated, vulnerable, astonished.

Dazzling and surreal sequences burst forth from caves and canyon walls...Magical, god-like coyotes, foxes, and owls fill these brilliantly vivid, evocative poems in which "the human figure looks pointless." Soniat rips open the lyric poem, as the singular "I" is displaced by the landscape. Confronted by the marvelous and bewildering animal kingdom, this speaker sheds "the human tongue."

Bright Stranger is exciting, troubling--visceral to the bone."   

-- Hadara Bar-Nadav, author of Lullaby (with Exit Sign)   

Praise for A Shared Life - New Laurel Review Comments on Katherine

"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."