All Possible Histories

(By Sonia Greenfield)

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Author	Sonia Greenfield

“Book Descriptions: All Possible Histories is a collection of poems that explore what could have been: ghosts have the ability to tell their side of the story, children shed the labels that bind them, mothers and daughters re-make their relationships, beloved pets never die. With poignant deft, this collection takes the reader on a journey of what might have happened and then returns them to the here and now, grateful not all alternative realities come true.

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All literature is a form of longing; poetry is desire laid bare. In her third full-length collection, All Possible Histories, poet Sonia Greenfield shows us an intensity of feeling, magnitudes of grief, nostalgia, hope, and loyalty that leave the reader breathless. At once humble and assured of her craft, Greenfield finds a measure of redemption for any of us who have made a mess of love. She asks, “even with every word at my disposal, this endless lexicon of empathy, what do I offer?” The answer is grace and a unique lyric skill, the answer is power.

—Brendan Constantine, author of Dementia, My Darling

In Greenfield’s deft fingers, these poems sing of a particular kind of survival: that humanness can be reckoned with through witness, through narrative, through prayer, through departure. With tenderness & reverence, the past is repurposed as promise, even if that is an act of penance: “we pull coins / for the meters from our drowned mouths / to pay for how we flicker at the edge.” Full of odes & elegies that examine how empathy functions in relation to the complicated histories of small-town America, motherhood, the body, the family, politics, & poetry itself, underlying this searing collection is a tone of exaltation: “you have to dance as if / the very act of living depends on it.”

—Chelsea Dingman, author of Through a Small Ghost

The poems in Sonia Greenfield's All Possible Histories are funny and serious, these are snot-nosed poems, and poems so smart I felt dumb. Sonia Greenfield’s range of subjects—her odes and elegies for the misshaped things of this world—is remarkable: Fukushima daisies, disturbing clowns, dead pets, the strangeness of Minnesota, Rent-A-Daughters, autism and Saint Anthony, Minecraft and motherhood, chat threads and radioactive isotopes, all rendered in precise rein-like lines. By the end of the book, I knew a lot more about exoplanets, aphids, and mayflies! And I knew I felt a whole lot more alive.

—Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Not All Saints”