The Descent

The Descent, Sophie Cabot Black’s anticipated follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Misunderstanding of Nature, describes a restless spirit at the crossroads of love and damage, rapture and disenchantment, the mountain and the descent. The voices of these poems struggle through the hesitancies of doubt and loss to end at more than survival or witness; they achieve clarity by singing of the resiliencies of the known world, after paradise inevitably fails. In these spare, lyric outcries, Sophie Cabot Black affirms her place as one of our most spiritually meaningful and ecstatically crafted contemporary poets.

“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

“I have admired Sophie Cabot Black’s poems for a long time, but this new book amazes me; I am amazed by such primal sincerity, such necessity-driven authenticity.  Something has asked her to awake to and endure a revelation—that the outer and inner worlds are one and the same place; clearly, she has obeyed, and she has done so with true passion, dread, humility, and ecstasy.  And in some of these poems, such as the almost unbearably poignant ‘Birthday,’ she has achieved a quiet greatness.” —Franz Wright