Winner of the Oscar Arnold Young Award

“The Swing Girl is poised between serenity and sorrow. Katherine Soniat’s themes are large, and her detail is exquisite. Her new book comes alive with wild, disciplined musicality. The arc has the intimacy and structure of a fugue; meaning modulates in the reader’s mind, rather than hardening on the page. Soniat’s lines are visceral:  ‘I began to feel as clear as water / but with that heaviness / too. // Wind on the mirror.’ The Swing Girl doesn’t rely on lyricism; it is a poetry of wide-ranging thought, deep feeling, and scrupulously assumed human responsibility which imagines its way beyond the scale of the individual—‘beauty on its way to becoming mystery.’ Soniat’s collection is passionate, generous, self-questioning, and masterful.”—D. Nurkse

“Many poets have written of the Mediterranean, but Katherine Soniat gives us poetry that so vividly calls up contemporary and ancient Greece, the hard light, the sea, the god-haunted groves and the graves, we feel as if we are there ourselves. Music propels this collection from section to section, poem to poem, music so beautiful that one wants only for it to keep playing. Poems in The Swing Girl possess an unsettling elusiveness though the language is stunningly exact, the focus clear and precise. The reader becomes immersed in foreshortened moments, things moving in and out of the periphery, odd alignments. We see the world anew—as Sir Thomas Browne puts it in this collection’s epigraph, it is the human who must live ‘in divided and distinguished worlds.’”—Kelly Cherry

“The poems in Katherine Soniat’s new collection, The Swing Girl, weave emotion’s ‘spray going farther than thought’ with the ‘bedrock things’ of the trod-upon world. These poems eddy and pool in unpredictable and often surprising ways, much as the mind moves in its twilight state between waking and sleep. The fluidity of their cadence and the luminosity of their imagery carry the reader to the wellspring of poetry itself, that deep delight of which Robert Penn Warren spoke, whose source is, in Soniat’s words, ‘beauty on its way to being mystery.’”—Kathryn Stripling Byer

In the title poem of The Swing Girl, a Greek burial relic with an image of a small child on her swing suggests the ability to move between present culture and the ghosts of history, between modern metaphor and the rhetoric of myth. Katherine Soniat celebrates this fluidity and the detached yet vulnerable perception that comes with it: “The territory that girl could cover, her eyes peering birdlike / across the grove. The air, a vector.”

Katherine Soniat has taught at the University of New Orleans, Hollins University, and was a  faculty member of Virginia Tech for twenty years. Currently, Soniat teaches in the Great Smokies Writing Program at the  University of North Carolina at Asheville. She has published work in  several journals including the Poetry, The Nation, The Southern Review, and Antioch Review.  The Swing Girl was awarded the Oscar Arnold Young Award for the best collection of poetry by a North Carolina poet in 2011 by The Poetry Council of North Carolina. Earlier works, A Shared Life, earned the Iowa Prize and was selected by poet Mary Oliver for a Virginia Prize in Poetry; Notes of Departure was selected by Sonia Sanchez for the Camden Poetry Prize given by the Walt Whitman Center for the Arts and Humanities.

Advance Praise for The Swing Girl

“The Swing Girl is poised between serenity and sorrow. Katherine Soniat’s themes are large, and her detail is exquisite. Her new book comes alive with wild, disciplined musicality. The arc has the intimacy and structure of a fugue; meaning modulates in the reader’s mind, rather than hardening on the page. Soniat’s lines are visceral:  ‘I began to feel as clear as water / but with that heaviness / too. // Wind on the mirror.’ The Swing Girl doesn’t rely on lyricism; it is a poetry of wide-ranging thought, deep feeling, and scrupulously assumed human responsibility which imagines its way beyond the scale of the individual—‘beauty on its way to becoming mystery.’ Soniat’s collection is passionate, generous, self-questioning, and masterful.”—D. Nurkse

“Many poets have written of the Mediterranean, but Katherine Soniat gives us poetry that so vividly calls up contemporary and ancient Greece, the hard light, the sea, the god-haunted groves and the graves, we feel as if we are there ourselves. Music propels this collection from section to section, poem to poem, music so beautiful that one wants only for it to keep playing. Poems in The Swing Girl possess an unsettling elusiveness though the language is stunningly exact, the focus clear and precise. The reader becomes immersed in foreshortened moments, things moving in and out of the periphery, odd alignments. We see the world anew—as Sir Thomas Browne puts it in this collection’s epigraph, it is the human who must live ‘in divided and distinguished worlds.’”—Kelly Cherry

“The poems in Katherine Soniat’s new collection, The Swing Girl, weave emotion’s ‘spray going farther than thought’ with the ‘bedrock things’ of the trod-upon world. These poems eddy and pool in unpredictable and often surprising ways, much as the mind moves in its twilight state between waking and sleep. The fluidity of their cadence and the luminosity of their imagery carry the reader to the wellspring of poetry itself, that deep delight of which Robert Penn Warren spoke, whose source is, in Soniat’s words, ‘beauty on its way to being mystery.’”—Kathryn Stripling Byer

The Swing Girl Readings

The Swing Girl Readings by Swing Girl

Links for The Swing Girl

"Ghost Laundry" on Poetry Daily

The Swing Girl photos on Flikr

Review of The Swing Girl in The Seawall biannual 18 Recommended Collections