Iron, Ardent

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0996571647 ISBN 13: 9780996571647

Publisher: Educe Press, 2017

Iron, Ardent takes its title from an untitled poem by Emily Bronte in which she asserts:“That iron man was born like me /And he was once an ardent boy/ He must have felt in infancy /The glory of a summer sky.” Like Bronte’s poem, this collection is concerned with tracing the world as a “Vale of Soul-Making,” in which we are formed and trans gured by the facticity of living, the being of the body, or as Black writes “the grief of the good body/which remembers everything.” In poems that track experience of disability, love, sex, disillusion, and motherhood, Black maps both the sorrow and glory of forming a soul in a world where “whatever will not shrivel must grow.”

About the Author:

Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone and Love/Iraq, (both from CW Press), and Wen Kroy winner of the 2011 Orphic Prize in Poetry from Dream Horse Press. She is a co-editor with Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, (Cinco Puntos Press). She received a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, for which she was selected by Philip Levine. She lives in San Antonio, Texas where she directs Gemini Ink, a literary arts center.

Review:

In Iron, Ardent, Sheila Black invites us into the working mind of a many-selved speaker-detailing the misfit, hushed rioter, resistor, lonelyheart, iron-willed, iron-boned woman who names the softest beauty and shame of an unquiet world. Black lures her reader to follow a dangerous thread onto "the unholy banks of blossom" and makes us feel right at home. -Laurie Ann Guerrero, Poet Laureate of Texas Reading Sheila Black's poems will take you back to the first time you heard the song, "Pretty in Pink," by the Psychedelic Furs, the five chords of the intro luring you into joy and longing, a sweetness and grief that made you want nothing more than to throw your school books into the air and run out into the sun, get in a car-any car-and drive to a place where no one could find you, your heart beating so fast it could almost gallop out of your mouth. And so, these poems, too, will bring you the memory of heartbreak and a poet's joy of language that explicitly, and implicitly, keeps asking, "What becomes of the lives we discard?" a question that means, ultimately, "What has my life become?" and you will hear, once again, that exquisite D-chord strumming all you were and all you ever wanted to be into one magnificent beat that no one but you can hear. -Octavio Quintanilla, author of If I go Missing