Practicing the World

The delights and conflicts of a long and loving marriage are revealed in these luminous poems written as the poet’s husband is diagnosed with cancer, endures treatment, and dies, all within months. With impressive technical mastery, Sornberger uses forms such as the sonnet, sestina, and villanelle—as well as free verse—to discover meaning and beauty in this time of loss. The pleasures of the present moment— birds at the feeder, creatures wild and domestic, dancing in the kitchen with her husband, and arguing hilariously about the afterlife —shimmer with life. Even as the poet mourns, grief gradually transforms into a deeper capacity for joy.

Judith Sornberger’s newest poetry book, I Call to You from Timecame out in July 2019 from Wipf & Stock.  Her other full-length poetry collections are Practicing the World (CavanKerry, 2018) and Open Heart (Calyx Books). She is also the author of five chapbooks, most recently Wal-Mart Orchid, winner of the 2012 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize (Evening Street Press).  Her prose memoir The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany was published by Shanti Arts Press. She is a professor emerita from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania where she taught English and created and taught in the Women’s Studies Program.

“A widow is a window / onto a certain abyss,” Judith Sornberger writes in this heart-harrowing, hope-ghosted and spirit-illumined collection, written in the wake of her husband’s struggle with and death from cancer. Plunged into a landscape where there are no maps, Sornberger creates her own, wringing beauty from tragedy in these radiant, searching, and indelible poems. Like cairns or way stations on the soul’s journey, they guide us through a grief-blasted landscape to the place where “one day even sorrow fractures.” Both elegy and praise-song, a portrait of a thirty-year marriage and a lyrical record of a woman in the process of recovering her sense of self, Practicing the World is ultimately a meditation about how we go on living. I’ve read many books about bereavement, but have never encountered one as honest, as courageous, as generous, or as redemptive as this one. A vital, shimmering contribution to both lyric poetry and the literature of loss, Practicing the World is a book of transformation, replete with mystery and wisdom.
-Alison Townsend
Author of Persephone in America and The Blue Dress

“One morning in County Kildare / long before you were ill / I was watching the new sun / brush the meadow’s lush coat,” writes Judith Sornberger in this stinging, singing collection of poems. Each page sears and seals us in the beauty of a life both extraordinary and ordinary, more poignant not in spite of our mortality, but because of it. This is a view from the edge, “the place / beneath light and word, / where there is only / being held and holding,” where even in the cancer unit Sornberger is “caught up / in praising all trees, bushes, / and perennials strutting their stuff / with the glitz of Vegas showgirls.” She knows that “grief has / its own sloppy timing. / Feeds on your heart when it’s hungry,” but she doesn’t give it the last word. Instead, she tells us about the “bed where you lay / in your last days, arranged / so we could watch the first snowfall— / slow, momentous, each flake perhaps / the final word on beauty,” and we are reminded once again of the world and its fragile, perilous glory, reminded to slow down and appreciate what’s shining, outside our own windows, before the dark comes down.
-Barbara Crooker, author of Les Fauves and Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems

2018
96 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
ISBN  978-1-933880-69-3