Orbit: Poems

The prize-winning poet brings her craft to a new level, turning her lyric lens on the worlds within worlds we inhabit, and how we navigate our shared predicament.

Here is the poet who bartered forty summers for black pearls, whose work is full of such wagers, embodied in playing cards, treble notes, snow globes, the tables of our lives on which is strewn the news of the day- the president speaking to the parishioners in Charleston, the ricochet of violence, near and far. Whether writing about the hairpin turns in the stair of childhood, about the cat’s claw of anxiety, the impending loss of a young and gifted friend, or about how love endures, give or take, Cynthia Zarin reminds us that the atmosphere created by our particular experiences shapes and defines the orbit we move through. A poetic descendant of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Zarin is both witness and, often indirectly, subject– I do not know how to hold the beauty and sorrow of my life, she writes. This book is an attempt at an answer- a collection that confirms her place as an indispensable American poet of our time.