Pages
78
Year
2025
Language
English

About

How close can a person come to home when their family has deserted it? Guided by this question, the poems in Nida Sophasarun's Novice traverse natural, animal, and dream worlds, seeking intimacy in a snake coming in from the rain, a mother's body imagined as a house, and the moon serving as both the missing piece and the linchpin in a night sky. Organized by tropical seasons and unfolding in Asia and the American South, Novice proposes that home is monumental and ruined, remembered and forgotten, local and diffuse, peopled and haunted.

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Reviews

"In the sprightly hands of Sophasarun, a poem is floral, existential, a '90s indie rockstar, a feathered emissary, a eulogy. Her work is cinematic, like memory, sensory in the tangible details."
Joseph O. Legaspi
"Novice is an astonishment. I know of no other debut collection with this much ambition, beauty, and poise. . . . Rigorous, lush, and wry, these poems are fueled by the most poignant forms of wanderlust and desire. I would follow them anywhere."
Cecily Parks
"Bodies abound in Novice because living abounds, and what is rare and exquisite about this first book of poems is the startling wisdom Nida Sophasarun summons from a life of wandering and questioning."
Jennifer Chang

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