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Winner of the 2019 National Book Award
"The sight lines in Sze's 10th collection are just that―imagistic lines strung together by jump-cuts, creating a filmic collage that itself seems to be a portrait of simultaneity." ― The New York Times
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.
National Book Awards, 2019
"Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts." - Publishers Weekly
"The wonders and realities of the world as seen through travel, nature walks, and daily routine bring life to the poems in Sight Lines." - Library Journal
"These new poems are stronger yet and by confronting time head on, may best stand its tests." - Lit Hub
"[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience―astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism―and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness." - The New Yorker
"Sze's is a deeply humanist and erotic sensibility, utilizing an unadorned diction and language steeped in the metaphoric possibilities that exist for us by mere dint of being human." - Chicago Review
"While the influence of Eastern poetry is usually felt in American poetry as imagism, in Sze's poems, that tradition is present not just as a quality of perception, but of thought--made available to us in all its complexity through a precision of language so refined that it feels like marksmanship." - Antioch Review
This information about Sight Lines was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Arthur Sze is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a National Book Award winner, and recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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