The Soul's Landscape

(a chapbook, with What's Worse, poems by co-winner Douglas Goetsch)
ISBN 1-888332-18-2

2001 Aldrich Poetry Prize (currently out of print)


A Commerce of Moments

ISBN 1-886350-68-X

2001 Editor's Choice, Transcontinental Poetry Award
Honor Book 2004 Virginia Literary Awards Competition

Pavement Saw Press, Ohio 2003


Corpus Homini: A Poem for Single Flesh

(a limited-edition chapbook, numbered and signed by the author)
ISBN-13: 978-0-916727-51-2 (alk. paper)

2008 Whitebird Poetry Series Prize
Wings Press

Fully Into Ashes

(forthcoming, 2011, Wings Press)

  
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Following are some reviews of my work. For other, more extensive reviews, please click the Reviews link in the left-hand margin of this page.


About A Commerce of Moments...

Couplet by couplet, Sofia Starnes leads her readers on a poetic quest for understanding. Her perfect pitch and her acute sensitivity to the pace and nuances of language are reason enough for us to follow. A Commerce of Moments is a gathering of very special poems.

—Billy Collins

A Commerce of Moments is a work of awe-inspiring clarity and purity of language from a poet whose wide-awake eyes allow us to experience a vivid, lasting world. Blessed is a poet so connected to what is most essential to this life, and perhaps the next, too. This book will enchant; a fine collection indeed.

—Virgil Suarez

In this first collection, Starnes shows us a world-view of dilemmas treated with compassion of the rarest sort, the act of listening and composing with a vivid transfer of feeling. This book is a rare occasion of thorough enjoyment.

—David Baratier


About Corpus Homini: A Poem for Single Flesh...

Extended works of praise are few: Thomas Traherne's Centuries ("all was new and shining"), Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno, Denise Levertov's O Taste and See... Sofia Starnes's Corpus Homini: A Poem for Single Flesh is a vital addition to the list. She begins with the old idea that we are stones (Ovid) or cages of bone, only to show that the spirit of life dances on our surfaces, while the flesh unites us to all creatures, their sense of the body as gift. Starnes does not cheat: "the aphids multiply," the body cells age. But there is joy on every page of Corpus Homini... as reliable as "the brown wren at the window," while the words of the poet are new, shining, and confident.

—Michael Mott, author of The World of Richard Dadd, and The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton