Faith Shearin
Faith Shearin is the author of Lost Language (Press 53) and six previous books of poetry: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award); The Empty House; Moving the Piano; Telling the Bees; Orpheus; Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize); and Darwin’s Daughter. She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Recent work has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and included in “American Life in Poetry.”
Ships mid November
Sample Poem
Box in a Closet
I open a box
in a closet and here I find us,
stuck in scenes long forgotten: my uncle
disappearing down an oak alley
in a horse-drawn carriage,
my grandmother dressed for a garden party,
gloves to her elbows, posed in a stiff
southern parlor, 1953. Here is the trip
to Disney World where we drank from
plastic oranges, held balloons
with ears; oh, we grow younger
on beaches, until we are babies, naked
on blankets, and my grandfather
rises from the grave to sit
in a wood-paneled living room
on a plaid couch, in a fedora.
I find my cousins beneath cypress trees,
in a river at sunset, and my sister,
age eight, dressed as a mosquito,
on her way to a costume party.
The van that floated away
in a hurricane reassembles itself
in our driveway and my father’s dog,
ten years dead, rides in a canoe
over the lagoon
where she will someday
drown: October falling,
my father’s hair black, his paddle
still in his hands.
Praise for Lost Language
Faith Shearin knows how to chart the landscape of loss with a skill you do not have to be a widow (or in my case, a widower) to appreciate fully. The persona of these poems is "the last native speaker of the language of our marriage,” a woman who is finding her way even though she can now "only speak grief.” I found myself rooting for her, for her heart, for the survival of her now diminished family "because a person alone is just a person.” This beautiful book has become a part of my own healing.
—Taylor Mali, author of Late Father & Other Poems
"Faith Shearin lifts back the barzakh, the veil between the living and the dead, in her latest and unquestionably best book of poetry. She takes something familiar to all of us—grief—and refashions it, coaxing a beautiful tune from a broken piano."
—B.A. Van Sise, author of Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry
What shall I praise first? Shearin's unparalleled lyric gifts, which shine in poems whose subjects include fly-fishing, mittens, and Amelia Earhart? Or maybe her acquired wisdom, which infuse her poems concerning the premature death of a loved one with a tragic imagination that reminds me of another confessional Massachusetts poet, Robert Lowell? Or perhaps her gorgeous odes to subjects as various as motherhood, travel, and birdsong, where Shearin, equal parts Romantic and Transcendentalist, inspires her readers to never cease marveling at the sheer wonder of the natural world? I can't decide. Instead I'll simply say that Lost Language provides further proof of something I've felt for years: Faith Shearin is America's greatest living poet."
—Kareem Tayyar, author of The Prince of Orange County and Immigrant Songs