Snow Over an Origami Heart

In this collection, Barbara Ellen Sorensen interweaves her neurological illness with the landscapes of the natural world. Hear you find poems that are conduits for healing by finding connection with nature, especially the snow, as flurries act as more than just a backdrop. The poet shares her recognition of beauty in the midst of grief and sorrow, where the cold, snow, and the delicacy of the human heart are unfolded and absorbed into life's milieu.

EARLY PRAISE:

In her opening poem, "Adaptation," Sorensen writes, The neurosurgeon instructs me. And Now in the midst of disease, / this neurologic, shaking illness, / I feel myself becoming what is opposite, / separated or divided... And the body becomes a simple outline / resembling the muted / arrangement of an early morning sky. How extraordinary this opening poem is-and deeply moving as well. How very much there is to value in this book.

-VERONICA PATTERSON, Inaugural Poet Laureate, Loveland, CO

Each poem in this quietly inspiring work is a constellation, a gyre, transposing what is temporal and known and fleeting into the complex shapes of a new world order: the heart, miraculous and moored, folding and refolding itself into the long reckoning.

-KATHRYN WINOGRAD, author, This Visible Speaking: Catching Light through the Camera's Eye

Sorensen's luminous new book, Snow Over an Origami Heart, takes poetry to breathtaking lyrical heights...Aching and rhapsodic, these poems address beauty and loss, contending with physical diminishment and personal tragedy. This is unforgettable, deeply moving work.

-RACHEL DACUS, author of seven novels and five poetry collections