I Say the Sky, a collection of poems by Nadia Colburn (The High Shelf), may be the perfect accompaniment for the short days and long nights of winter. The beautiful cover will draw readers in, and the 42 poems create a welcoming invitation to Colburn's accessible and lyrical work.
After quoting Lucille Clifton and Walt Whitman in the epigraphs, the book begins with "I Think It Is Such a Beautiful," a poem that springboards off that title into its opening lines: "dawn/ and my mind,/ which wants to hold things/ as they are, cannot hold/ this morning." Images of birds, flight, and sky thread through the poems, with a sense of yearning evoked in pieces like "Teach Me," which leans from the title into "how to pray anywhere./ Teach me that you live/ not only in the open field,/ the cardinals singing at first dawn,/ but also in the concrete parking lot/ of the Everett Mall, in the flashing lights of Old Navy,/ in the wires crossing the open expanse/ above me."
The middle section introduces new emotions, drawing on the kind of trauma that lives long in the body, as in the fragile vulnerability expressed in "And the Small Body" or in "Rage:" "like the flames that keep you/ away with their heat, all you could not say/ billowing in that conflagration--No." But always there is a tender earnestness, a desire to be present in each moment, to "[p]raise the sky and the stones that also/ breathe into this moment, now." --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian