Insofar

by Sarah Gridley

Overview

Insofar is a collection of poems dedicated to analogical reasoning, seeking to remember basic terms of relation and proportion. Archival in mood, it works with and against the idea of an A-Z filing system. This alphabet is akin to a damaged rosary or abacus—an accounting system that carries on in the midst of physical or spiritual impairment. While the poems proceed alphabetically, there are gaps in representation, and redundancies. The poems get stuck in certain alphabetic registers and elide over others. Four of the poems share the same title, “Insofar,” as if transfixed by the relational reasoning set up by that adverbial phrase. The collection as a whole is cast in an adverbial mood, exploring disposition as a vital qualifier to thought and action. Its theology, insofar as it finds one, is earth-based, pluralistic, and cyclical. Its fondest prayer is that we come to our senses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936970650
Publisher:	New Issues Poetry and Prose
Publication date:	04/21/2020
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.75(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Sarah Gridley is associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. Her poetry collections include Weather Eye Open, Green is the Orator, and Loom.

Table of Contents

Afterward 6

Alibi 7

All Earth Wears 8

Analogue 9

Analogue 10

As Mica Means Crumb, and Galaxy, Milk 11

Autumn 15

Cerebral 16

Chair 17

Coccolithic 18

Coincidence 19

Color Wheel 22

Comedy 23

Compounding Pharmacy 24

Correctly 25

Custody of the Eyes 26

"Diabolic Clouds Over Everything" 27

Do No Harm 28

Eunomia 29

Gloriana 30

Housework 31

Idle 32

Insofar 33

Insofar 34

Insofar 35

Insofar 36

Liquidity 38

Monotonic 39

Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom 40

Noon 41

Openly 42

Platform 43

Poem 44

Polygraph 45

Practical Transparency 46

Quetzalcoatl 47

Radical Empiricism 50

Radius 51

Rappelling 52

Selkie 53

Shellycoat 54

Shodo 55

So Far Out 56

Suncatcher 57

Taliesin 58

The Depletions 59

"The Hour Has Come to Remember the Dead" 61

The Kiss 62

The Path Back Barely Findable 63

The Prefecture 64

Thoughts Before Whittling 65

Tidy 66

Tithonos 67

Unsound Supposition 68

Vital Materiality 69

When My Sister Poets Leave 70

Where Are the Days of Tobias 71

Zephyrus in Four Corners 72

Editorial Reviews

Within the artifice of the alphabet’s orders—that architecture, that archive—we must find a way to inscribe an actual attention culled from the fact of our lives. We might note the facts tend to go astray, feel less than factual, and become a kind of faith. What such work requires, Sarah Gridley knows, is a strange and generous openness, one that welcomes in the world ‘as the shy host might a desired guest.’ Such hospitality is an ancient form of genius, a genius embodied in the kind complexities of these wondrous, wondering poems. . . . The I, the eye, is open ever-wider in these poems, somehow shy and somehow audacious, reverent and truthful, a genius of the heart and the hearth and the earth and the art.” 

Dan Beachy-Quick

Although its titles form an abecedarian, Sarah Gridley’s Insofar eschews ornament, irony, and merely trendy formal experiment. Her lyric poems are implicative, understated, their traces of narrative never resolving into tidy conclusions or gems of wisdom. Each stanza has a heuristic brilliance, an understated, mysterious gravity derived from the author’s constant attention to the uncounterfeitable particularity of her language— measured out in wildly alive lines broken to splay and recalibrate meanings. Gridley’s poems might be said to inaugurate the school of existential intimacy.

Forrest Gander