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Sight Lines
In his National Book Award-winning tenth collection Sight Lines, Arthur Sze lends the reader his prismatic lens, rendering contemporary reality in stunning complexity. Moments of grace, eros, and beauty are braided with shudders of terror and threats of ecological destruction, as Sze moves nimbly through intersections of the disparate and divergent. Using formal disruption, legible erasure, and a diversity of voices—lichen on a ceiling, salt on the table, a man behind on his rent—each page transmutes simplicity into simultaneity, and chaos into compelling song. Sze is a Pulitzer finalist and a widely-revered poet, whose exquisite craft continues to expand our view: there are “so many / worlds to this world.”
80 pages, Paperback
First published April 9, 2019
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About the author
Arthur Sze
36 books70 followersArthur Sze (b. 1950 New York City) is a second-generation Chinese American poet.
Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish.
He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe.
He is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and a Western States Book Award for Translation.
Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish.
He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe.
He is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and a Western States Book Award for Translation.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 91 reviews
September 23, 2019
I found the poems in this collection difficult to connect with. While it seems that Sze was writing about transformation and impermanence, I often felt that the lines of the poems were somewhat random and didn’t give a clear impression of the the author’s meaning. Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for poetry.
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September 20, 2021I spent all weekend talking about this White House scene (mastodonic):
Black Center, Arthur Sze
Green tips of tulips are rising out of the earth—
you don’t flense a whale or fire at beer cans
in an arroyo but catch the budding
tips of pear branches and wonder what
it’s like to live along a purling edge of spring.
Jefferson once tried to assemble a mastodon
skeleton on the White House floor but,
with pieces missing, failed to sequence the bones;
when the last speaker of a language dies,
a hue vanishes from the spectrum of visible light.
Last night, you sped past revolving and flashing
red, blue, and white lights along the road—
a wildfire in the dark; though no one
you knew was taken in the midnight ambulance,
an arrow struck a bull’s-eye and quivered
in its shaft: one minute gratitude rises
like water from an underground lake;
another, dissolution gnaws from a black center.
Black Center, Arthur Sze
Green tips of tulips are rising out of the earth—
you don’t flense a whale or fire at beer cans
in an arroyo but catch the budding
tips of pear branches and wonder what
it’s like to live along a purling edge of spring.
Jefferson once tried to assemble a mastodon
skeleton on the White House floor but,
with pieces missing, failed to sequence the bones;
when the last speaker of a language dies,
a hue vanishes from the spectrum of visible light.
Last night, you sped past revolving and flashing
red, blue, and white lights along the road—
a wildfire in the dark; though no one
you knew was taken in the midnight ambulance,
an arrow struck a bull’s-eye and quivered
in its shaft: one minute gratitude rises
like water from an underground lake;
another, dissolution gnaws from a black center.
March 6, 2025
Between the time I wrote this little review for my local book column and the time it appeared, Sze's book won the National Book Award! A worthy winner!
Between the time I write this and the time you read it, we will know whether or not Arthur Sze has won the National Book Award for his latest collection of poems, Sight Lines. That his book has appeared on this short list is another in a long list of recognitions that include a near-miss on a Pulitzer. He is a past chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. This makes Sze sound as if he’s one of the Grand Old Men of the poetry establishment. But once you know his poems, that impression seems entirely wrong.
Almost twenty years ago, Sze published The Silk Dragon, a very personal selection of translations from the Chinese. In eighty pages he skipped through 2,000 years of Chinese poetry, but his purpose was not to give a survey of Chinese verse. It was to find inspiration, a way back to his own practice, in the example of the careful and precise observations of poetic forebears. His poems, like the ancient Chinese poems he has so meticulously translated, are built on what seems an almost spiritual belief in the power of precise observation of the things we see around us.
In Sze’s own work, however, those things are shaped by an imagination that puts them in unexpected relationships with other objects in the world. In an early poem in Sight Lines, the wildfires that are devastating the western states are set next to a woman making delicate confectionaries or a water drop that “hangs at the tip of a fern.” At the end he allows himself to go from the smallest moment to an apocalypse in just a few lines:
In the West, wildfires scar each summer–
water beads on beer cans at a lunch counter–
you do want to see exploding propane tanks;
you try to root in the world, but events sizzle
along razor wire, along a snapping end of a power line.
The “sight lines” of the title are presented at several points throughout the book. They appear as simple fragments running down a page, at first seemingly unconnected. As we go back to the moments in these fragments, we realize that there is an imaginative jump between them. In the title poem, a collection of such fragments–including images of nuclear explosions, horses, and walks in the desert–ends:
I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field–
fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand–
though parallel lines touch in the
infinite, the infinite is here–
Each line grows out of those that came before (for instance, “field” in one line becomes a verb in the next), until at the very end the poet brings the infinite into this very moment.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
Between the time I write this and the time you read it, we will know whether or not Arthur Sze has won the National Book Award for his latest collection of poems, Sight Lines. That his book has appeared on this short list is another in a long list of recognitions that include a near-miss on a Pulitzer. He is a past chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. This makes Sze sound as if he’s one of the Grand Old Men of the poetry establishment. But once you know his poems, that impression seems entirely wrong.
Almost twenty years ago, Sze published The Silk Dragon, a very personal selection of translations from the Chinese. In eighty pages he skipped through 2,000 years of Chinese poetry, but his purpose was not to give a survey of Chinese verse. It was to find inspiration, a way back to his own practice, in the example of the careful and precise observations of poetic forebears. His poems, like the ancient Chinese poems he has so meticulously translated, are built on what seems an almost spiritual belief in the power of precise observation of the things we see around us.
In Sze’s own work, however, those things are shaped by an imagination that puts them in unexpected relationships with other objects in the world. In an early poem in Sight Lines, the wildfires that are devastating the western states are set next to a woman making delicate confectionaries or a water drop that “hangs at the tip of a fern.” At the end he allows himself to go from the smallest moment to an apocalypse in just a few lines:
In the West, wildfires scar each summer–
water beads on beer cans at a lunch counter–
you do want to see exploding propane tanks;
you try to root in the world, but events sizzle
along razor wire, along a snapping end of a power line.
The “sight lines” of the title are presented at several points throughout the book. They appear as simple fragments running down a page, at first seemingly unconnected. As we go back to the moments in these fragments, we realize that there is an imaginative jump between them. In the title poem, a collection of such fragments–including images of nuclear explosions, horses, and walks in the desert–ends:
I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field–
fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand–
though parallel lines touch in the
infinite, the infinite is here–
Each line grows out of those that came before (for instance, “field” in one line becomes a verb in the next), until at the very end the poet brings the infinite into this very moment.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
December 16, 2022
i read every poem in this collection at least twice and i just think Sze has such talent in weaving so many threads throughout this book. so much beautiful natural imagery balanced with violence/destruction and breathtaking moments of intimacy it made me achey and it made me really think deeply about love in general and the specific love in my life 🥲
June 23, 2022
This short book of poetry by Arthur Sze won the National Book Award in 2019.
The poetry in this collection is compressed, juxtaposed and very heavy on imagery. Many of the poems combine the thoughts of a young Sze and an aging Sze. I thought this approach that used two different lenses from the same poet was very effective. I imagine one would have to have an extensive body of work to pull this off.
So I enjoyed this book immensely. It felt very familiar and soothing to me. Maybe my brain is largely organized in the same way, millions of images and memories all tenuously connected in some way.
My favorite poems were The Glass Constellation, Under a Rising Moon, Adamant and Cloud Hands. The first is a lengthy juxtaposition poem, the second about New Mexico and the Anasazi, and the last two poems are nature poems.
5 stars. Highly recommended if you like poetry.
The poetry in this collection is compressed, juxtaposed and very heavy on imagery. Many of the poems combine the thoughts of a young Sze and an aging Sze. I thought this approach that used two different lenses from the same poet was very effective. I imagine one would have to have an extensive body of work to pull this off.
So I enjoyed this book immensely. It felt very familiar and soothing to me. Maybe my brain is largely organized in the same way, millions of images and memories all tenuously connected in some way.
My favorite poems were The Glass Constellation, Under a Rising Moon, Adamant and Cloud Hands. The first is a lengthy juxtaposition poem, the second about New Mexico and the Anasazi, and the last two poems are nature poems.
5 stars. Highly recommended if you like poetry.
September 9, 2019
"What line of sight leads to revelation?" From this deceptively innocent question, Arthur Sze's Sight Lines poems begin in the presentational, and find in the woman meditatively listening to sycamore leaves an equivalence for the wind in the leaves.
In an extraordinary poem that seems to canvas the resemblances to being on site in among the Diné's most sacred places, the Canyon de Chelly: "a man who flies by helicopter and lands | on an iceberg will always bear the crunching | sounds under his feet." So sauntering down to the White House Ruins, Sze hears the "scraping of cottonwood leaves" bearing them as he watches for elk on the way out of the Canyon.
The "you" in the poems is that saunterer's companion, sometimes the self, other times apparently a lover. "[W]e track migrating caribou, | and their shifting bodies make visible || the magnetic lines of the moment; | the magpie hops onto an apple tree stump, | flies to a fence post, up to a branch;|| you want that absorption, that vitality, | when you turn the key at the door, step inside;" the passage suggests that the "you" is both lover and self -- this, "absorption," then, is part of a practice; it will include the narration of a "he" and a "she."
A mosaic formulae to Sze's ideogrammatic parataxis: the patterns of tea leaves in hot water, kintsugi, cloud hands and python skin, constraining (and riding up those) muscles, then letting go; back and forth, statement and refrain: "I'm walking on silt, glimpsing horses in a field, | fielding the shapes of our bodies in the white sand | though parallel lines touch the infinite, the infinite is here."
In an extraordinary poem that seems to canvas the resemblances to being on site in among the Diné's most sacred places, the Canyon de Chelly: "a man who flies by helicopter and lands | on an iceberg will always bear the crunching | sounds under his feet." So sauntering down to the White House Ruins, Sze hears the "scraping of cottonwood leaves" bearing them as he watches for elk on the way out of the Canyon.
The "you" in the poems is that saunterer's companion, sometimes the self, other times apparently a lover. "[W]e track migrating caribou, | and their shifting bodies make visible || the magnetic lines of the moment; | the magpie hops onto an apple tree stump, | flies to a fence post, up to a branch;|| you want that absorption, that vitality, | when you turn the key at the door, step inside;" the passage suggests that the "you" is both lover and self -- this, "absorption," then, is part of a practice; it will include the narration of a "he" and a "she."
A mosaic formulae to Sze's ideogrammatic parataxis: the patterns of tea leaves in hot water, kintsugi, cloud hands and python skin, constraining (and riding up those) muscles, then letting go; back and forth, statement and refrain: "I'm walking on silt, glimpsing horses in a field, | fielding the shapes of our bodies in the white sand | though parallel lines touch the infinite, the infinite is here."
August 1, 2024
In this collection, I felt a sense of connectedness with humanity and nature. Every poem bleeds into the next poem and informs the previous poems. I don't think there is a right or wrong way to read this book. I could have started at the end of in the middle and would have understood the collectiveness that is apparent in these poems. They feel more like fractures and stills of time and moments. At any given moment in the world, someone is dying, birthing, living, being shot, eating breakfast, pressing a button to launch a missile, igniting a fire, etc. Each poem is comprised of many fragments and moments coalescing in the sense of universality. In a way, these poems are an argument against the individual, and an argument for connection through the expansion of space and time.
A challenging and thought provoking book that will have me pondering for many years.
A challenging and thought provoking book that will have me pondering for many years.
May 8, 2020
I have had a soft spot for Arthur Sze's for a long time: he mixes a lush vocabulary with a spare style and the seeming juxtaposition in his images can come off, at first, as random and them as deeply expressionistic. This collection's focus on transformation and impermanence makes those juxtapositions particularly thematically appropriate even if they are often jarring. Sze rewards lingering and meandering, slowly digesting the images and resonances. This requires patience but Sze's generally rewards you, particularly on re-reading.
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August 14, 2019"So many transfigurations I will never fathom.
The arc of our lives is a brightening then dimming,
brightening then dimming—a woman catches
fireflies in an orchard with the swish of a net."
The arc of our lives is a brightening then dimming,
brightening then dimming—a woman catches
fireflies in an orchard with the swish of a net."
August 11, 2025
As a poet from Utah now living in New Mexico, I found Sze’s focus on the history of the Southwest relevant and intriguing, and the content in this collection furthers my curiosity to learn about the history and people of the regions I’ve lived and am living in. I also found that many of Sze’s poems hold spiritual depth and remind me of translations of Rumi and Kabir. The ending of “Under a Rising Moon” particularly feels Rumi-esque to me. Something about “the tracks of moonlight” and how they “run ahead” into an ethereal realm that feels just out of reach though can be felt and experienced in this reality. In regard to form, style, and technique, I think Sze’s use of the monostich is smart. The collection is called “Sight Lines,” and the monostich embodies this title. While Sze often stitches the monostichs together in a way common to many poets, he plays with the form and blends it with prosody. “Lichen Song,” for example, feels like a monostich and prose poem because em-dashes bookend the piece (similar to how monostichs are formatted earlier in the collection) though the text itself is formatted in a prosaic block. Overall, I found this collection interesting for both its content and style and think it’s a worthwhile read.
October 15, 2022
One of my top 10 poetry collection reads this year.
Not my typical style of poetry, but classic Copper Canyon Press. Sze can weave like no other—spatially, temporally, and from first- to second-person without a blink of an eye. Imagery, as always is rich but the potency of symbols and metaphors can only be accessed by reading it through and understanding the arc of the gestures. Leading poem "Water Calligraphy" and ending "The Glass Constellation" are unbelievable. "Traversal" and "Lichen Song" also favourites.
Highly recommend listening to Arthur Sze talk read and talk in dialogue with the poetry editors of The New Yorker podcast.
Not my typical style of poetry, but classic Copper Canyon Press. Sze can weave like no other—spatially, temporally, and from first- to second-person without a blink of an eye. Imagery, as always is rich but the potency of symbols and metaphors can only be accessed by reading it through and understanding the arc of the gestures. Leading poem "Water Calligraphy" and ending "The Glass Constellation" are unbelievable. "Traversal" and "Lichen Song" also favourites.
Highly recommend listening to Arthur Sze talk read and talk in dialogue with the poetry editors of The New Yorker podcast.
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January 15, 2020I really loved these poems. The "prismatic lens" of the blurb is an apt description, as they are mostly composed of a series of kaleidoscopic images, leaping from one to the next in stream-of-consciousness associations that leave the reader to ponder their connections. The opening poem describes Chinese water calligraphy, done with a giant swab on pavement, something beautiful, meaningful, and transient, and that is a theme of these poems.
You can read the title poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
You can read the title poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
April 26, 2020
There is so much going on in this collection. The stylistic choices are interesting, especially where Sze chooses to strikeout words or phrases. Overall, I find these pieces to be too academic for me to really get anything from. There are only one or two pieces in this collection that feel accessible to me as an average reader. I think it would be interesting to study the collection, but just to read it for and by myself I find the message(s) too convoluted.
March 20, 2020
This was the third of the 5 National Book Award finalists for poetry that I have completed. Score 4.5:
When I first cracked this collection a few weeks ago, I struggled a bit to connect with its almost free association-like style. I had also just completed another finalist, the amazing Deaf Republic, which has a near-linear plot. But then, in the last three weeks a certain virus had brought a lot of change to the world. So I began again and found that the state of the world/my mind was primed for Sze's fever dream kaleidoscope of words.
To get the value of these poems, I'd suggest giving time and space to the reading experience, taking time to re-read passages and take them slow if not connecting. Much like reading Virginia Woolf (which I'm currently reading), superficial reading of these poems will chew you up and spit you out. And like Woolf, Sze allows the barely conscious static of our thinking to carry equal weight with the obvious and convenient things we are usually more conscious of (but not necessarily comfortable with).
Two lines describing a simple but rapturously beautiful observation might be immediately followed with a reference to toxins, disease, or violence, and then bounce back to the everyday mundane before bounding into something transcendent. So, reading this during a pandemic provided a very helpful context, highlighting Sze's themes and reflecting the harshness and the profound beauty of life.
Personally, I tire of poetry that seems to constantly throw in random thoughts and observations if it doesn't lead to some greater purpose. Slight Lines does that, building Sze's world slowly and beautifully. References to things, places, people - the Southwest US, peonies, desert mountains and arroyos, rabbits, Thomas Jefferson, the night sky and stars, Asia, nuclear waste, coyotes, touch and intimacy with a partner - begin to repeat and build to a soft, satisfying crescendo.
The core ideas here are typical fodder for poets that can easily become trite and cliche, but these poems are so genuine, sensual, and committed to being present to the moment, that Sze steers very clear of those traps. It's as if he's saying that the aspiration to being present to the beauty of life can only be appreciated if we're honest and notice the ugly and despairing moments as well. This is one of my favorite verses that gets to the heart of it:
If you inhale and spore this moment,
it tumors your body, but if you exhale it,
you dissolve midnight and noon; sunlight
tilts and leafs the tips of the far Norway maples.
When I first cracked this collection a few weeks ago, I struggled a bit to connect with its almost free association-like style. I had also just completed another finalist, the amazing Deaf Republic, which has a near-linear plot. But then, in the last three weeks a certain virus had brought a lot of change to the world. So I began again and found that the state of the world/my mind was primed for Sze's fever dream kaleidoscope of words.
To get the value of these poems, I'd suggest giving time and space to the reading experience, taking time to re-read passages and take them slow if not connecting. Much like reading Virginia Woolf (which I'm currently reading), superficial reading of these poems will chew you up and spit you out. And like Woolf, Sze allows the barely conscious static of our thinking to carry equal weight with the obvious and convenient things we are usually more conscious of (but not necessarily comfortable with).
Two lines describing a simple but rapturously beautiful observation might be immediately followed with a reference to toxins, disease, or violence, and then bounce back to the everyday mundane before bounding into something transcendent. So, reading this during a pandemic provided a very helpful context, highlighting Sze's themes and reflecting the harshness and the profound beauty of life.
Personally, I tire of poetry that seems to constantly throw in random thoughts and observations if it doesn't lead to some greater purpose. Slight Lines does that, building Sze's world slowly and beautifully. References to things, places, people - the Southwest US, peonies, desert mountains and arroyos, rabbits, Thomas Jefferson, the night sky and stars, Asia, nuclear waste, coyotes, touch and intimacy with a partner - begin to repeat and build to a soft, satisfying crescendo.
The core ideas here are typical fodder for poets that can easily become trite and cliche, but these poems are so genuine, sensual, and committed to being present to the moment, that Sze steers very clear of those traps. It's as if he's saying that the aspiration to being present to the beauty of life can only be appreciated if we're honest and notice the ugly and despairing moments as well. This is one of my favorite verses that gets to the heart of it:
If you inhale and spore this moment,
it tumors your body, but if you exhale it,
you dissolve midnight and noon; sunlight
tilts and leafs the tips of the far Norway maples.
September 5, 2021
I've long admired Sze's poetry, but this is the first entire book of his I've read. As I do with all poetry collections, I went through it slowly, look at only a few poems each day.
Sze's imagery is full of unusual juxtapositions that are fresh and give new clarity to the ordinary, that make the reader consider the world anew.
The problem is...when I first encountered this form in a another poet, 5 or 6 years ago, it was startling. But now it feels tired and trendy. I get a lot of current poetry in my inbox and it's everywhere. Too many poets are compiling discrete, often unrelated, moments and throwing random facts into their distilled images. A doe appears alongside a meal being prepared and morphs into a fact about an insect that becomes a friend or lover on the writer's mind and then a catastrophe on the other side of the world appears reflected in arcs and ripples of rainbows rivers and skies and the ecological precariousness of the earth's inhabitants and the death of the author's beloved dog. Then back to the doe who vanishes.
All artists have styles, and the best have imitators. But the best also somehow transcend repeating themselves. I will be interested to see if Sze expands his writing into something different that moves beyond the cliche this form has become. Was he the first to do this? Does it matter?
I could not see past the style's repetitiveness for many of these poems.
Sze is a close observer and a fine writer. Despite my problems with the overall book, there are still gems that glitter here. I especially liked "Traversal", "Black Center", "Courtyard Fire", "Talisman", and "Sprang."
Quetzal: you write
the word on a sheet of paper
then erase it;
each word, a talisman,
leaves a track
Sze's imagery is full of unusual juxtapositions that are fresh and give new clarity to the ordinary, that make the reader consider the world anew.
The problem is...when I first encountered this form in a another poet, 5 or 6 years ago, it was startling. But now it feels tired and trendy. I get a lot of current poetry in my inbox and it's everywhere. Too many poets are compiling discrete, often unrelated, moments and throwing random facts into their distilled images. A doe appears alongside a meal being prepared and morphs into a fact about an insect that becomes a friend or lover on the writer's mind and then a catastrophe on the other side of the world appears reflected in arcs and ripples of rainbows rivers and skies and the ecological precariousness of the earth's inhabitants and the death of the author's beloved dog. Then back to the doe who vanishes.
All artists have styles, and the best have imitators. But the best also somehow transcend repeating themselves. I will be interested to see if Sze expands his writing into something different that moves beyond the cliche this form has become. Was he the first to do this? Does it matter?
I could not see past the style's repetitiveness for many of these poems.
Sze is a close observer and a fine writer. Despite my problems with the overall book, there are still gems that glitter here. I especially liked "Traversal", "Black Center", "Courtyard Fire", "Talisman", and "Sprang."
Quetzal: you write
the word on a sheet of paper
then erase it;
each word, a talisman,
leaves a track
March 12, 2022
You know that whiplash you sometimes feel when a book takes you back and forth between times and places. That. Only every few phrases instead of every few pages. These poems are not anchored to individual themes though. They incongruously connect multiple random thoughts and events.
Added: I think the author is using the idea that diametrically opposed concepts can exist in the same time period, beauty and destruction, human kindness and impersonal greed. And all such things that exist now have existed across time. What we perceive in any one moment does not encompass all of experience in every time and every place.
Added: I think the author is using the idea that diametrically opposed concepts can exist in the same time period, beauty and destruction, human kindness and impersonal greed. And all such things that exist now have existed across time. What we perceive in any one moment does not encompass all of experience in every time and every place.
December 23, 2019
I guess I just didn’t get these poems. They won the National Book Award, so I assume it’s me that’s missing something but I felt like the lines didn’t connect for me in a way that delivered a message. Each line might be interesting or beautiful but I couldn’t see how they came together. At one point there was a poem that was partially made of the last lines of other proms. The focus seemed to be on nature, nuclear power and a woman.
December 15, 2025
The day has the tensile strength of silk:
you card the hours, spin them, dip
the skeins in a dye pot, and grief or anger,
pleasure or elation's the mordant that fixes
the hue.
there's something going on in the structure of this book that i'm not sure i understand, but the language is astonishing, the perception clear, the emotion sharp. awe-inspiring work.
July 21, 2020
steeped in nature and biological imagery, so lovely. I really loved the poems where the speaker took the form of a growth of lichen or table salt. a lot of times i don't "get" poems by old guard poets/poets who have been writing a long time but I felt like this collection had a lot to teach me without me racking my brain to figure out what was going on. will definitely return to it in the future
October 13, 2024
what an interesting collection of poems. sze uses simultanaity throughout his poems, juxtaposing many things that are happening all at once, often which have a common thread of some sort between them. i really enjoyed "traversal," "lichen song" (had to take a minute to let it sink in after that one), "courtyard fire," and "salt song."
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July 3, 2020to be a turtle...or tea leaves..or lichen
May 24, 2021
Favorite poems:
Unpacking a Globe
Adamant
First Snow
Courtyard Fire
The Far Norway Maples
Unpacking a Globe
Adamant
First Snow
Courtyard Fire
The Far Norway Maples
January 28, 2025
Sorry to keep rating every poetry book I read as 5 stars but I swear they are all great! I mean come on Sze was a national book award finalist. This is obviously good shit! I really liked it!
June 7, 2025
A lovely collection of poems blending a long term relationship/live poems with descriptions of nature/eco-poetry. So many gorgeous phrases in this collection! Recommend!
July 20, 2025
"A guitarist leans into the space
between notes; a stone plummets
down a black well: he does not know the silence when he will aim a bullet
at himself."
between notes; a stone plummets
down a black well: he does not know the silence when he will aim a bullet
at himself."
December 21, 2019
Makes a compelling case to have cemented himself as our best image-forward poet. Each poem is filled with delightful and surprising graphic cuts and matches.
March 3, 2020
what makes this book of poems stand out is the way it ties each poem into itself. i think that if you miss how the book does that, each poem seems disjointed and unfocused rather than as part of a greater network of ideas informing each other.
this is what i was hoping garbage by a r ammons would read like. loved “water calligraphy” and ”salt song” - “sight lines” and “water constellation” were both really surprising to me, given the repetitions that occurred within the text already. given my reading of river river, I think sze is good at writing poetry along contemplative thought and following through with it
this is what i was hoping garbage by a r ammons would read like. loved “water calligraphy” and ”salt song” - “sight lines” and “water constellation” were both really surprising to me, given the repetitions that occurred within the text already. given my reading of river river, I think sze is good at writing poetry along contemplative thought and following through with it
October 7, 2020
I appreciated what this work of poetry had to say about nature, water, life, and just how the world constantly changes and evolves in general. It did open my eyes to things I don’t normally think about, such as how we can effect climate change and global warming. I did think it was beautiful, but not my style of writing.
February 26, 2023
An award winning collection of poems that make it easy to understand why it is acclaimed. Two things stand out to me. First, the visual images that Mr. Sze paints make what most people think as commonplace be seen with great significance and beauty. Secondly, many single sentences are very thought provoking and beautiful This makes multiple readings of the book rewarding and you learn new things each time. Great collection.
November 10, 2025
Sight Lines
Arthur Sze
I found this collection very moving—Sze is very deserving of America's Poet Laureate position—for he is precise & intentional in the details he selects—like asking the reader to look through a telescope at the panorama—gaze under a microscope at minute happenings—and there is something even more profound to delve into between the [sight] lines—
FAVORITE LINES (A FOUND POEM)
A green turtle in broth is brought to the table
while everyone eats, strands of silk tighten, tighten in my gut
who knows the mind of a watermelon vendor picking his teeth?
you try to root in the world, but events sizzle along razor wire
I know water is my ink, memory my blood—now I block the past by writing the present—I draw the white, not the black—What unfolds inside us?
If all time converges as light from stars, all situations reside here.
hail has shredded lettuces
we have limned the time here
we fold this in our pocket and carry it wherever we go.
as a cursor blinks, situate at the edge of loss—but what line of sight leads to revelation?
The day has the tensile strength of silk: desire branches like mycelium.
Though I have botched this, bungled that, the errancies reveal it would not be better if things happened just as I wished; an accountant yearns to stroll in a meadow
you sliver if you just go go go
you can urge the dare and thrill of bliss if and when you stop to look at a rock at a fence post
the minute gratitude rises like water from an underground lake;
another, dissolution gnaws from a black center.
Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams
and as he relights the pilot
a widening hole gnaws at that time
suddenly small things ignite
I love the sighs you make when you let go
gratitude rivers through me:
and you surge at what's unfolded in the world: where are the gates to paradise?
we need no equation to feel the sprang of space and time
the scroll and unscroll of your breath
so many transfigurations I will never fathom
I awake to the unrepeatable contour of this breath
how the glimmering light at the beginning of the world is in all things.
the scratched words return to their sleeves, the woman who sits and writes
but what thins at your fingertips?
The aspirations of a minute, a day, a year?
The unfolding of a life has junctions that rupture plot:
If you inhale and spore this moment, it tumors your body, but if you exhale it, you dissolve midnight and noon; I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—gazing into the vortex of the white page: who knows the path of a man on crutches begging at a stoplight? at that moment, grief and joy tip the ends of a scale; detonations in the past are laced in garlic now; you felt how a skin separated you from death, how death contoured the pause between exhale and inhale
yet never lock into crystal patterns, you feel how once never locks, how it vibrates, quickens inside you: you lift the gate—
Arthur Sze
I found this collection very moving—Sze is very deserving of America's Poet Laureate position—for he is precise & intentional in the details he selects—like asking the reader to look through a telescope at the panorama—gaze under a microscope at minute happenings—and there is something even more profound to delve into between the [sight] lines—
FAVORITE LINES (A FOUND POEM)
A green turtle in broth is brought to the table
while everyone eats, strands of silk tighten, tighten in my gut
who knows the mind of a watermelon vendor picking his teeth?
you try to root in the world, but events sizzle along razor wire
I know water is my ink, memory my blood—now I block the past by writing the present—I draw the white, not the black—What unfolds inside us?
If all time converges as light from stars, all situations reside here.
hail has shredded lettuces
we have limned the time here
we fold this in our pocket and carry it wherever we go.
as a cursor blinks, situate at the edge of loss—but what line of sight leads to revelation?
The day has the tensile strength of silk: desire branches like mycelium.
Though I have botched this, bungled that, the errancies reveal it would not be better if things happened just as I wished; an accountant yearns to stroll in a meadow
you sliver if you just go go go
you can urge the dare and thrill of bliss if and when you stop to look at a rock at a fence post
the minute gratitude rises like water from an underground lake;
another, dissolution gnaws from a black center.
Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams
and as he relights the pilot
a widening hole gnaws at that time
suddenly small things ignite
I love the sighs you make when you let go
gratitude rivers through me:
and you surge at what's unfolded in the world: where are the gates to paradise?
we need no equation to feel the sprang of space and time
the scroll and unscroll of your breath
so many transfigurations I will never fathom
I awake to the unrepeatable contour of this breath
how the glimmering light at the beginning of the world is in all things.
the scratched words return to their sleeves, the woman who sits and writes
but what thins at your fingertips?
The aspirations of a minute, a day, a year?
The unfolding of a life has junctions that rupture plot:
If you inhale and spore this moment, it tumors your body, but if you exhale it, you dissolve midnight and noon; I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—gazing into the vortex of the white page: who knows the path of a man on crutches begging at a stoplight? at that moment, grief and joy tip the ends of a scale; detonations in the past are laced in garlic now; you felt how a skin separated you from death, how death contoured the pause between exhale and inhale
yet never lock into crystal patterns, you feel how once never locks, how it vibrates, quickens inside you: you lift the gate—
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