Manual for Living

A powerfully gifted psalmist, Sharon Dolin creates in the 'Of Hours' section of her book a singular world of praise and pain. Charged with biblical echoes and reminiscent of the religious poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, her language strains and buckles to give voice to her yearning, as God ('you') appears and disappears, hour by hour.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, author of The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious

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In this sixth collection by award-winning poet Sharon Dolin, Manual for Living offers three distinct approaches to life, each one riven by flashes of joy and despair, and all conditions in between. With a fresh slant on the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, the title section offers a part-serious, part tongue-in-cheek series of advice poems. An ekphrastic sequence based on the “black paintings” of Goya follows, as a darker meditation on life. The final section, “Of Hours,” is a contemporary sequence of psalms where the possibility for redemption in prayer exists. As in all of her work, Dolin’s lyric voice attends to language and the world equally. Her verbal sleights-of-hand offer readers insights for ways to live. Manual for Living is a wise book: drink deeply from it.

More Praise

Employing a sparkling linguistic palette, Dolin's poems rejoice, mourn a little, and then laugh at life's reality of not knowing the future, the divine, or one's own purpose.

Salamander

Manual for Living contains poems that bloom via rhyme and wordplay into complex and disarming self-knowledge and self-instruction. There is comfort and delight in the movement and mind of these poems.

Matthea Harvey

Table of Contents

Sample

112 Pages, 5.7 x 9 in.

March, 2016

isbn : 9780822964063

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

about the author

Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and Manual for Living (Pittsburgh, 2016). Her fourth book Burn and Dodge (Pittsburgh, 2008) won the 2007 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of a prose memoir Hitchcock Blonde (Terra Nova Press, 2020) and two previous books of translation from Catalan: Gemma Gorga’s Book of Minutes (Field Translation Series/Oberlin College Press, 2019), which received grants from PEN and Institut Ramon Llull, and Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga (Saturnalia Books, 2021), winner of Saturnalia Books inaugural Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize, a Finalist for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, Fulbright Scholarship, AWP Donald Hall Prize, Pushcart Prize, and Witter Bynner Fellowship, Dolin is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and teaches poetry workshops in New York City.

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