Novice: Poems

by Nida Sophasarun

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.

94 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 3, 2025

Reviews

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed especially the last few poems

[Matthew Buckley Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poignant, skillful, lovely poems. Novice is winning and melancholy, pretty and specific and memorable. Sophasarun writes with great understanding and no pridefulness. Her work exemplifies Yeats' teaching that poetry should seem--but not be--effortless.

[Kae · Rating 3 out of 5]

This poetry is extremely observant, it reminds me of Mary Oliver but expanded from just nature. Very unique descriptive language too!