The Inextinguishable

by Sharon Marcus

Sharon Marcus is a Sufi poet, novelist and explorer of meaning in her non-fiction. With these poems she presents a collection of all those she wants to save from the last five years.

Here we find aspects of mystical experience in its variety of seeking, searching, loving, losing, of humor and sorrow, all preserved within the inner clarity of each dedicated sound and sacred syllable. She remains a champion of the chaste poetic craft, invoking the unknown through the known.

Focusing always on a point of light even in the clusters of darkness surrounding our worlds, her inextinguishable persistence in the sound, the texture and the upheavals of illumination make this distinctive voice penetrate our own thoughts in a deliberate and specific way.

Marcus has always pursued a haunting sense of meaning in its relation to the context of language in certain expressions resonating with pleasing sorrow, in outbursts of wit and compassion. All this leads us to the inner value of worlds invested in her poetry and its verbal truth.

Perfect Paperback

Published December 1, 2020

About the author

Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is a founding editor of Public Books and the author of the award-winning Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton) and Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London.