Overview

How close can a person come to home when their family has deserted it? Guided by this question, the poems in Nida Sophasarun's Novice traverse natural, animal, and dream worlds, seeking intimacy in a snake coming in from the rain, a mother's body imagined as a house, and the moon serving as both the missing piece and the linchpin in a night sky. Organized by tropical seasons and unfolding in Asia and the American South, Novice proposes that home is monumental and ruined, remembered and forgotten, local and diffuse, peopled and haunted.

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9780807183908

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Reviews

""Bodies abound in Novice because living abounds, and what is rare and exquisite about this first book of poems is the startling wisdom Nida Sophasarun summons from a life of wandering and questioning."" - Jennifer Chang ""Novice is an astonishment. I know of no other debut collection with this much ambition, beauty, and poise. . . . Rigorous, lush, and wry, these poems are fueled by the most poignant forms of wanderlust and desire. I would follow them anywhere."" - Cecily Parks ""In the sprightly hands of Sophasarun, a poem is floral, existential, a '90s indie rockstar, a feathered emissary, a eulogy. Her work is cinematic, like memory, sensory in the tangible details."" - Joseph O. Legaspi

Author Information

Nida Sophasarun is from Atlanta, Georgia, and holds degrees from Wellesley College and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has lived and worked in Bulgaria, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Myanmar, and Taiwan. Her poems appear in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, wildness, and elsewhere.

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