As When Waking
The poet will be joined by colleague Geoffery Babbitt
In As When Walking, Schonning offers us language at its most incandescent. Sweet sweet truths in poem after poem. Shimmering and satisfying…Gentle and yet irrefutable…
–Camille Dungy
The poems of Daniel Schonning’s debut collection range from personal examinations of childhood suffering and loss of faith to deep observations of images and objects to the foreclosure of a family home, a father estranged by addiction, mallards on a frozen pond, flowering bindweed, and a door to the underworld. With all its component pieces, As When Waking aims to apprentice itself to the medium of letters, inviting readers to listen and learn from the systems and symmetries of alphabets.
Schonning employs structural paradigms to explore themes of poetic lineage. Twenty-six of the poems in this collection are abecedarians, a form where the opening letter of each line advances through the alphabet, with the lines of the first poem proceeding alphabetically from A–Z, while those of the second poem move from B–A, and then C–B, all the way to Z–A. This structure is tied to Jewish mystic texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah, which probes the relationship between the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the world they inhabit.
Daniel Schonning’s debut poetry collection, As When Waking, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, selected by editor Srikanth Reddy as part of the relaunched Phoenix Poets Series. Schonning’s poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Poetry Daily, Orion Magazine, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A runner-up for 92Y’s 2022 Discovery Poetry Contest, he was the recipient of the 2023 Omnidawn Broadside Prize, Crazyhorse/swamp pink’s 2020 Lynda Hull Memorial Prize, and was featured in Best New Poets 2024. He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where he teaches creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and serves as a Poetry Editor for Seneca Review.
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This is a hybrid event in-person at Writers & Books, 740 University Avenue
Rochester, NY and live streamed.
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