84 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Language Arts & Disciplines / Phonetics & Phonology | Poetry / American-General | Poetry / Women Authors
The word “sibilance” refers to pronunciations of the letter “s,” including the emission of a hissing or whistling sound. As the title of Sally Van Doren’s fourth collection of poetry, the word alerts readers to the sounds of language in the poems that follow in abecedarian order. Filled with wordplay, Van Doren’s poems vacillate between the extremes of joy and despair, by turns witty and chagrined, punning and reflective.
The poems gathered in Sibilance aim to clarify their author’s ambivalence concerning living life and writing about it. Her unique investigations teem with distilled images encased in the language of irreverence and awe.
A St. Louis native, Sally Van Doren is a prize-winning poet and artist who has taught at the 92nd Street Y and other public and private institutions. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Sex at Noon Taxes, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.
“Tactile, luminous, and original in voice, Sally Van Doren’s Sibilance is a journey of the body and its elusive ache and the shape of living in the name of life itself.”—Rachel Eliza Griffiths
“Van Doren transports us from the inside of our own bodies to the cosmos in a single line and renders even the banalities of life with an imagery that gains in power, pulling the poems of this collection into one ecstatic dance.”—Emma Sheanshang
“Van Doren’s trim and brisk poems display a thrilling diction at every turn. She applies wit and acuity equally to both exultation and elegy.”—Chanda Feldman
“Sibilance is a beautiful, propulsive excavation and magnification of life’s transitions. At times heart-wrenching, Van Doren’s voice is piercingly anatomical, yanking us deeper into a synesthetic understanding of colors as emotions, trees as companions, bodies as maps.”—Phyllis Grant
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