I Say the Sky: Poems

by Nadia Colburn

Overview

In poems at once profound and accessible, Nadia Colburn finds splendor and astonishment in a natural world—and a human world—that is deeply troubled yet still majestically beautiful. Both elegy and celebration, I Say the Sky addresses some of the most challenging aspects of human existence, from childhood trauma to environmental devastation, and discovers, in unexpected and clear-sighted ways, wisdom, wonder, and peace.

Colburn's brilliant second book charts a journey to meet the self. From girlhood to parenthood, loss to discovery, in poems that sing, the book explores how meaning is made. Claiming the female voice from silence, the poems find their grounding in the body and achieve rootedness and hope.

I Say the Sky is a meditative and ultimately inspiring book that will be savored by seasoned readers as well as those new to poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813198637
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	01/16/2024
Series:	University Press of Kentucky New Poetry & Prose Series
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Nadia Colburn is the author of The High Shelf, and her poetry and prose have appeared in more than eighty publications, including the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Spirituality & Health, Lion's Roar, and the Yale Review. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and is the founder of Align Your Story Writing School, which brings traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children. Find her at nadiacolburn.com, where she offers meditations and free resources for writers.

Table of Contents

Section 1
I Think It Is Such A Beautiful
Upflying
Smaller Even than Last Week
The End of History
Adulthood
4am
Section 2
The Physical World
Anxiety
What We Are Taught
Section 3
Memory
And the Small Body
Catalog of Beautiful Girls
Stone Girl
Sleeping Beauty
Rage
Know
Knowing
Reading to My Daughter
Section 4
On My 43rd Birthday
Summer Evening
Hands
Teach Me
On the Shortest Day of the Year
March
Imaginary World
My Throat
Outside the Sparrows are Awake
Section 5
Happiness
6pm
Invocation
Section 6
When Death Comes
August
Arrival
Onion
Today Like Yesterday
Amid So Much Suffering, Do I Dare Be Happy?
Midwinter
Power
May I Greet You
Rain Pours off the Eaves of the House
12am
You
Postscript
Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

Nadia Colburn's book I Say the Sky is made of timely and urgent questions. "What is missing? In the house of my life." With skillful metacognition Colburn approaches the inexpressible, explores ephemerality, trauma, ecological devastation, and how everything connects to the quotidian. These poems are wonderfully awake to our unspeakable lives. She writes: "I want so badly to live sometimes I forget / that I am alive." In this collection Colburn couples gravity with gratitude and creates a bright infusion of healing and regeneration.

Laynie Browne author of Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists

Nadia Colburn has written a marvelous book of poetry that will appeal to poetry lovers everywhere. These poems speak to the human condition and its transitions and transformations, making meaning of life's difficulties and showing us how to turn them into celebrations. I recommend their imagery, beauty, and powerful metaphors to everyone.

Lewis Mehls Madrona

I Say the Sky distills ordinary passing moments of a world made striking, made memorable. But as the poet disperses such moments into the poems, that world is made strange, made unsayable. Whatever has been named vanishes into something else; whatever has been exiled returns on the next horizon: next line, next verse, next poem. In Colburn's poetics, a pinpoint of memory foreshadows an unshakable sense of dislocation, the strangeness of inhabiting a body and a world in which we can never be just one thing. All the while the ineffable, even the unbearable, runs to meet joy. Reading these poems, certain load-bearing words—stones, hands, a voice, the sky, to name a few—orchestrate a controlled music that surprises us and sends us back to read them again, and again. What more could one ask of poetry?

Annie G. Rogers

Colburn's fluid style lends itself well to an ambitious work that handles the most personal violations and miracles of the individual body alongside the broadest, most universal themes of the present moment....A haunting, memorable, and highly enjoyable read.

The Harvard Crimson

The tender, fierce poems that populate I Say Sky are poems that vow to be present: 'This is not a poem about escape / The great transition is not an escape / but a turn in which we meet the self / we may not want to meet.' These great transitions are momentous—birth and death—but they also exist in hours of quotidian caregiving that hum with meaning. Cutting carrots, reading a book aloud to a child, planting seeds, and even sitting in silent stillness demand the body's attention. The permeable, powerful female body, the (un)sung hero of this book, knows the generosity of speech, of gesture, of touch, of saying in all its bodily forms. In an act of communion with the world, I Say Sky 'translates the spruce forest of [the] heart,' for all whose ears are open to hear.

Sasha Steensen

From the opening poem and on through this glorious book, Nadia Colburn strikes the difficult balance between celebrating the splendor of the world we inhabit and acknowledging the grief and devastation that none of us can escape. As much a book of love songs as a book of elegies, I Say the Sky is a heart opening and mind sharpening collection. 

Camille T. Dungy

In I Say the Sky, the poet sees our world with its obvious need of repair and our inability to agree on the name of that repair. In that space she goes after the crystalline beauty of delivering the lyric from inside the human heart as it presses its rhythm against the rhythm of our world, naming the precious things only a poet who values the present moment can know. What a wonderful collection Colburn has wrought.

Afaa M. Weaver Kingsley Tufts Award Winner and author of A Fire in the Hills

Colburn connects words to earth, body to family, and family to nature. Here, language is sacred; uttering a word, composing a line, writing a stanza is a prayer of joy even if the context is loss; even loss can be an occasion to be grateful. Colburn has given poetry a breath that revives it, that urges others to see deeper and reclaim their humanity.

Jimmy Santiago Baca author of A Place to Stand

The poems in I Say the Sky are both a hymn to what's lost and a hymnal for how to carry on. "We must do something," Nadia Colburn writes, and that writing is part of the something––as is the cataloguing both of diminishment and plenty. "Teach me to pray anywhere," she says, guiding us to look for transcendence not only in "the cardinals singing at first dawn,/but also in the concrete parking lot/ of the Everett Mall."

Andrea Cohen Author of The Sorrow Apartments

Nadia Colburn's book of poems, I Say the Sky, describes a world both realistic and beautiful. Colburn writes clear and accessible lines that ring of thought amid action; of a mind and body charged to recognize and speak of more things than they knew possible outside of the self but from a self. Can the self be a thing, albeit a beautiful thing, that grows and does not simply strive or perfect? I am struck by how much these poems surprised me and led me to think and re-think, not with an end in mind, but with a world in mind. It's a heartening and strengthening collection, not sentimental in the least, which still manages, as some say of good poetry, "to help us live our lives." I Say the Sky will be a book read toward a meditative, calming effect, in which gratitude, sorrow, and surprise are interwoven, as they surely must be in actual readers' lives. I am grateful for this work and for the gift of these poems.

Lisa Williams

These are sharply-focused lyric meditations that memorably dramatize the simplicity and anguished complexity of the world and the heart that fully inhabits it.

Gregory Orr