Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry
From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices ― from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent ― and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry.
Review
“His poems enact the prodigious multiplicity and simultaneity of any one moment. The best way to show this may be to offer his technique in action, particularly evident in the title poem, in which time, place, danger, culpability, and desire blur and turn into one another in a temporal, sensory frisson.” Virginia Quarterly Review
Review
“Sze artfully matches style and content....Finely crafted and philosophical, this is a book that rewards multiple careful readings.” Publishers Weekly
Review
“Inside these poems of billowing consciousness, we too are alive to a spectrum of wonders.” The New York Times
Synopsis
Sze, in drawing connections between the pastoral and the catastrophic, speaks to a contemporary condition in which we are constantly fragmented and made whole again as we are presented with a saturation of narratives. In his scenes of the quotidian, musings on life and death, and traversals between the natural and the artificial, Sze opens us to multitudinous lines of sight.
About the Author
Arthur Sze has published ten books of poetry, including Sight Lines (2019); Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian-American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. He has also published one book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon (2001), selected for the Western States Book Award. Sze is the recipient of many honors, including the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. His poems have been translated into a dozen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Korean, and Spanish. Sze was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2017 and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012 to 2017. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives.