Description
Book Synopsis"Despite the rapids these poems navigate, each poem has an internal cohesiveness that cannot have been easy to achieve."--Dana Wilde, Bangor Daily News "The human voice is captured beautifully as one can almost hear the fist pounding the podium--or kitchen table--at the end of each line."--Gently Read Literature "Nowhere else in American poetry do I come across a passion, a cunning, and a joy greater than his. And a deadly accuracy. I see him as one of the supreme poets of his generation."--Gerald Stern The poems in True Faith are earthy, lyrical, honest, and empathic in a style that is both gritty and urbane. With wry humor, Ira Sadoff's latest collection addresses family, faith, and the quiet joys of aging. Ira Sadoff currently teaches in the MFA program at Drew University and serves as the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts professor of English at Colby College in Maine.
Trade Review"The remembering minds in these poems bounce from one probing question or self-abrasive feeling to another with a sort of Kafka-like cohesive disjointure...There is something reassuring and anxious about the fashioning of coherence out of utter confusion."--BDN Maine Living "And rarely does a speaker feel so complete on the page. He [Sadoff] operates with a clear confidence of a man who trusts his memory, yet is tempered with humility and a pointed self-awareness that includes an acute awareness of irony and humor as the profane and sacred coexist, not on the same planet or even city, but in the same room. There's an honest volatility that makes these poems explode off the page, quickly leaping from lyric grace to a swagger and then back to a peaceful confession..." --storySouth An Academy of American Poets' Notable Book of 2012, True Faith, "poses questions about happiness and resilience...[and] often gesture towards a common humanity...[in which] moments of divinity emerge in unexpected places...to Sadoff, it is imagination that allows faith, fosters possibility, and evidences beauty," --Claudia Rankine "Poems that visibly grapple with difficult subjects, and that often do so with language that cuts roughly to the bone..." - West Branch Wired
Table of ContentsTable of contents I. True Faith In Madrid American Lament Down by the Old Mill Stream The Sound and the Fury (1991) Oyster Bay Apologia My Country Surely the Wind Blue Catamarans Mood Rings as Foreign Policy Water Musik Worry Fills the Brim of my Hat Padlocked Adam In Virginia In a Southern Climate Dies Irae II. MAYBE “Orphans” “Question” “Objectively, in Church,” “A Mighty Fortress” “Diagnosis” “The War” “Chamber Pot” “Like Magic” “This Morning” “Stirhouse” “The Gift” “Elegy” III. America II TRUE FAITH Table of Contents (continued) The Aftermath Lapses Before Id Memoir While in Brooklyn For Beauty What I Meant In my Little Paradise Listen Once I Could Say Ex-Wives Happenstance To the Gods The Numbness Because We Have Failed So Often At the Polynesian Paradise in the Mall of America Dispel Me Revival Heavens
