Description A Wake with Nine Shades is an exploration of grief and culpability, a Dantean descent through contemporary midlife crisis.
Populated by ghosts and children, lovers and amputations, bodies of water, insomnia, debt and domestic violence, Steinorth measures what is broken against the white space of the page, paying homage to the Great Lakes and snowscapes her poems inhabit and the vacancies, denials, and drains they circle.
Formally inventive and musically obsessive, the book's unconventional formal construction and lyric wit contribute what Eleanor Wilner deems the essential Lightness described by Italo Calvino, noting Steinorth's ability to treat weighty subjects with a mastery of style .
a liveliness of imagination and intelligence that lightens, without denial, what would otherwise be unbearable.
About the Author JENNIFER SPERRY STEINORTH is a poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist, and licensed builder.
Her poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Colorado Review, The Journal, jubilat, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West and elsewhere.
She has received grants from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Vermont Studio Center, Warren Wilson College where she received her MFA in poetry, and The Bear River Writers' Conference.
In 2016 she was the Writers@Work Poetry Fellow selected by Tarfia Faizullah and won the Connecticut River Review Poetry Prize judged by Penelope Pellizon.
Her first full-length book, A Wake in Nine Shades, a finalist for the Hillary Gravendyke prize, the Barrow Street Prize and Press 53 open read, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press in autumn of 2019.
A hybrid text of visual poetry/erasure is forthcoming from Texas Review Press, Spring of 2021.
Texas Review Press A wake with nine shades: poems, paperback/jennifer sperry steinorth
