I Say the Sky
Nadia Colburn
I Say the Sky is an accomplished and moving book of lyric poetry that explores finding one's bearings against the backdrop of the ever-unfolding climate crisis and the losses, injustices, and vulnerabilities of the contemporary world. Here we find the speaker, a woman–mother, wife, daughter, friend–in the middle of her life, trying to find meaning and sustenance in a complex world that also offers much beauty and love.
The book follows the speaker's mind, imagination, and body on a journey to greater aliveness. To get there, the speaker must not just find presence, but also go backward to recover hidden and frozen parts of the self. The central sections of the book examine what happens in her own and in so many women's lives as their voices get cut off by sexual violence. As she reclaims that voice and agency in her own life, the speaker, in the final sections, is able to come into greater integration; the dichotomies of self/other and interior/exterior dissolve.
Colburn's poems speak from a long tradition of sacred poetry whose goal is to unravel the tension and arrive at greater insight. Readers who enjoy Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary Oliver, and Lucille Clifton will enjoy I Say the Sky. Richly textured and in dialogue with a long poetic tradition, intimate, and at once highly skilled and accessible, these poems invite the reader on a personal, social, spiritual, physical, and lyric journey.
The poems address urgent questions and offer, if not answers, a vision of resilience and, ultimately, wonder. Without ever veering towards the sentimental or the easy, I Say the Sky will speak to professional poets as well as to a wider audience of poetry and literature lovers—women and men looking for song and solace.
I Say the Sky will be of interest to readers, poets, teachers, activists, and healers interested in the following topics:
The climate crisis and ecological awareness
Trauma studies and healing
The relationship between the body and language
Spirituality, meditation, and the power of language to go into often-unspoken spaces
Poetry as a form of attention
Women's voices and the history of literature
Parenting and the role of the artist as parent
Breaking family, historic, and other silences
The lyric poem and the encounter with the self