Description: Sojourners of the In-Between is a book about polarities, the mortality and sense of loss we feel as we grow older, and, on the other hand, the enlivening perceptions our years attune us to, what we might have missed in the full flush and energy of youth. In tones that are sometimes discursive and lyrical, humorous and elegiac, the poems suggest how large distances and abstractions might incline us more intensely to the materiality of things, their earthly make-up, even their dispersible elemental natures reshuffling into different guises. It's a book of longing for what disappears and is lost, and a book of thankfulness for our human capacity to sometimes sense what we often can only imagine.
Brief description: Gregory Djanikian has published six previous collections of poems with Carnegie Mellon, most recently Dear Gravity. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and have been featured on PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He was for many years the director of creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives outside Philadelphia.
Review Quotes: "It's odd to use the word 'wise' with one's own contemporaries, but that is the word that best describes the appealing and eloquent voice in this collection. It is a voice that knows what it doesn't know but knows for certain that celebration and naming are the way to be a sojourner in this life where so much depends on what 'we are willing to risk.' . . . In the concluding poem, 'Thankfulness, ' Djanikian affirms his own thankfulness whenever someone has 'just played a genius note / or spoken a word that was never there / until it was.' The lines could well be a description of this reader's response: thankfulness for the many genius notes and words that are now here in this collection for all of us to be grateful for."--Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents