Bite Every Sorrow

“This is a splendid book, morally serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning.” — C. K. Williams, from his judge’s citation for the 1997 Walt Whitman Award

Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities, because, as Ras asks, “What’s life without the details?”

Her ability to tap the ordinary and draw forth profundity is brilliantly displayed throughout this collection. Whether honoring a dead friend or reveling in the lustful music of insects, Ras’s poems poke into unlikely nooks and invented crannies, uncovering questions that matter to everyone — how to laugh, how to hope, how to love.