Imperfect Present

Imperfect Present is a book for our current moment. By confronting the urgencies of daily life, from questions of identity to sexual abuse to racial unrest to the ubiquity of plastic, these poems investigate ways to sustain ourselves in our fraught public and private lives. With her characteristic linguistic play, Sharon Dolin illuminates some of the most personal concerns that resonate throughout our culture and in ourselves, such as error, despair, uncertainty, and doubt. In sections that deploy the lens of art, the “Oblique Strategies” of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, and meditations on dreams and spirituality, Imperfect Present provides a panoply of approaches that grapple with the complexity of now.

More Praise

Imperfect Present is a stunning book, not simply for its depth of feeling, piercing wit, and well-earned wisdom but also for the brilliant play of language, the sheer sonic pleasures of it. Whether meditations on art, mortality, social justice, what it means to be and do good, these are poems startling both in their range and clarity of vision—at once delighting and jolting the mind toward recognition and a new apprehension of the world we thought we knew. I am reminded that Sharon Dolin is a poet for our time whose necessary voice I return to again and again.

Natasha Trethewey, former US poet laureate and author of Monument: Poems New and Selected

There are many ways to describe Imperfect Present, Sharon Dolin’s new collection of poems—delightful, earthy, erudite, engaging—but dazzling says it best. A master of form, Dolin offers a prismatic, often intimate, look at origins: language, country, belief, the self. Though many poems take on our worst imperfections—hatred, violence, degradation of the planet—others make room for generosity, an embrace of our failings, ‘the shattered pieces of some inconceivable whole.’ Imperfect Present is a powerful inquiry into what it means to be human, living in our present moment. As Dolin asks, ‘even in the midst of sorrow how may I—we—still summon joy?’

Ellen Bass, author of Indigo

Sharon Dolin’s marvelous new collection, Imperfect Present, brings with it her profound lyric intelligence and elegant, eloquent wit. Her brilliantly charged language embodies those shifting tensions, those often mercurial, often intense reflections that accompany us along the paths and passages of a life. Compassionate and compelling, Dolin’s collection is, as its title suggests, truly the perfect book for our imperfect present moment.

David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

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