Geometry of the Restless Herd
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Inverting the pastoral, Sophie Cabot Black uses the keeping of animals and tending of land to interrogate the self and in turn reveal new truths about the social, economic, and political realities of contemporary America.
In Geometry of the Restless Herd, Sophie Cabot Black stages a powerful allegory for the social and political realities of our human world. Through hauntingly metaphysical poems set within a sheepherder's domain, Black conjures fields of harvest and resurrection, of wagers and outcomes--animals to keep, and those destined for slaughter. Here, both singular voices and polyvocal choruses argue through discourse, asking who has the real power, and how are we to survive the violence we do to each other?
Black's scenes are at once oneiric and raw: a squeaking gate wails against neglect; a field receives a runt body; a raccoon flees with egg dripping from its mouth--all while lush rains and long winters quiet the dead. Navigating both confining pens and wide-open spaces, these poems ask startlingly immediate questions about captivity and freedom, protection and exploitation, confronting the predicaments of late capitalism: industries of infinite regress, technologies that exceed us, and a soul stranded somewhere between expectation and redemption. Ultimately, these stark pastorals paint a moving portrait of life: as utterly inseparable from the world it inhabits.
About this Author
Sophie Cabot Black (she/her) is the author of four collections of poetry Geometry of the Restless Herd, The Exchange, The Descent, the Connecticut Book Award winner, and The Misunderstanding of Nature, the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award winner. Black has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Provincetown's Fine Arts Center, and the Radcliffe Institute as well as prizes including the Grolier Poetry Prize, John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Emerging Poets Award from Judith's Room. She was also recognized as a Lambda Literary finalist. Her work can be found in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Black has taught at the New School, Rutgers, and Columbia University, and she currently teaches creative writing at the 92nd St Y and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She divides her time between New York, Connecticut, and Colorado.
Reviews
Praise for Geometry of the Restless Herd
"Black lays out a measured exploration of recent politics and inner turmoil in her latest collection. The poems vary from philosophical arguments to allegory rooted in a plot of farmland. In tight stanzas Black carefully frames her imagery. . . . Much like a moving and ferocious natural landscape, Black's poems stir a progression of observations and emotions."--Michael Ruzicka, Booklist
"Cabot Black's stunning, fable-like fourth collection urges readers, 'do not expect the known; you were not there.' This unusual and poignant volume is equal parts gothic and pastoral, full of incisively written imagery characterized by sparse stanzas that allow each line to shine. . . . The poems in this collection run no risk of being mistaken for another poet's oeuvre. Singular and striking in their movements and tone, they are a testament to delicate beauty. Cabot Black walks the tightrope between the gnomic and the visceral, and sticks the landing with the utmost skill and tenderness."--Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
"Form and content collude symphonically in Black's lean, laconic poems. From catalog verse and aphorism, to persona poems in the voices of animals, language emerges as a co-creationary power. . . . The thrust of Geometry of the Restless Herd, while taking account of our straying, incomplete, and changeling natures, is toward revelation."--Virginia Konchan, Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation
"I was not expecting a book of pastoral poems centered around sheep herding to be so scathing, fiery, and politically eloquent."--Lily Naifeh-Bajorek, Poetry Society of New York
Praise for Sophie Cabot Black
"[Sophie Cabot Black has] concocted a way of speaking in poetry that's very fresh and daring."--Billy Collins, The New York Times
"Cabot has a gift for abstracting the familiar in an effort to recapture memory, skillfully using negation to suspend sense. . . . In these poems Black weaves sheer elegance and devastating knowing."--Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
"These poems remind us of the ways we each pass through the stations of a life. In doing this, they capture the wonder of trying to inhabit life's shapes at all. . . . With precision, Black's poems skirt great mysteries."--NPR, All Things Considered
"The poems in The Exchange . . . are emphatically alive. This fierce energy breathes life back into the hopeless soul . . ."--Huffington Post
"Black's voice is startling, jagged and implacable, and The Descent is steep, precipitous and dazzling-all the way down from a hard-earned heaven."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Black is a passionate and breathlessly forceful writer. . . . The Misunderstanding of Nature is a distinguished collection, one of the liveliest first books in years."--Poetry
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