Serena Solin’s first full-length collection pulls from the pre-individual realm of birth and infancy, the collectivity into which we grow, and the narrow pathway in between.

Drawing on sources from Dostoyevsky to Boyz n the Hood, Emerson to Olson, the Puritans to Honda Civics, Solin’s poems and essays ask what it means to write in a world of lush and violent textuality. Elision, evasion, and allusion resolve in form and familiarity, then come undone. Always on the wrong side of the tracks, Solin moves through perspectives beyond the human, from the inanimate to the entomological, the etymological to the world-historical. When tragedy strikes, the world shatters into clarity. 

Serena Solin’s first book is a stellar accomplishment, a luminous elegy on loss that unfolds in inventive forms: There’s poetry of course, but also plays, essays, and anagrams. In conversation with poets and thinkers from Transcendentalism to the Language school, Solin reminds us of our collective grief as well as our collective strength. A Barer Sky proves that the complexity and heat of the tender heart pressed up against the cold cannot be extinguished. 
—Brenda Coultas