Description: ""Insofar" is a collection of poems dedicated to analogical reasoning, seeking to remember basic terms of relation and proportion. Archival in mood, it works with and against the idea of an A-Z filing system. This alphabet is akin to a damaged rosary or abacus-an accounting system that carries on in the midst of physical or spiritual impairment. While the poems proceed alphabetically, there are gaps in representation, and redundancies. The poems get stuck in certain alphabetic registers and elide over others. Four of the poems share the same title, "Insofar," as if transfixed by the relational reasoning set up by that adverbial phrase. The collection as a whole is cast in an adverbial mood, exploring disposition as a vital qualifier to thought and action. Its theology, insofar as it finds one, is earth-based, pluralistic, and cyclical. Its fondest prayer is that we come to our senses"--
Brief description: Sarah Gridley is associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. Her poetry collections include Weather Eye Open, Green is the Orator, and Loom.
Review Quotes: "Within the artifice of the alphabet's orders--that architecture, that archive--we must find a way to inscribe an actual attention culled from the fact of our lives. We might note the facts tend to go astray, feel less than factual, and become a kind of faith. What such work requires, Sarah Gridley knows, is a strange and generous openness, one that welcomes in the world 'as the shy host might a desired guest.' Such hospitality is an ancient form of genius, a genius embodied in the kind complexities of these wondrous, wondering poems. . . . The I, the eye, is open ever-wider in these poems, somehow shy and somehow audacious, reverent and truthful, a genius of the heart and the hearth and the earth and the art." --Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Of Silence and Song