"In spare, riveting lines, Arda Collins' new poems enact a torque between immediacy and distance, between a visceral near and a resplendent far ... This is a book of wonders." --Arthur Sze
Arda Collins' second book of poems, Star Lake, is a deeply personal collection that explores the ways our notions of daily life touch the presence of the eternal. With memory as the backdrop of many poems, including the loss of the poet's parents and her experience growing up in a family of survivors from the Armenian genocide, Collins often overlays images of landscapes, weather and domestic interiors with a tone of melancholy--"Who is the water and who is the light? / A shiver, a love, one you miss, and a wish." But Star Lake is also a collection of love poems: poems about the creation of new memories with family and tracing out imaginative shapes for their futures. In this Yale Younger Poets award winner's second collection, Collins returns with truly unforgettable poems that haunt and comfort.
Arda Collins (born 1974) is the author of It Is Daylight (2009), which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, A Public Space, Colorado Review, jubilat and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Sarton Award in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.