Praise for Lost Language

Faith Shearin knows how to chart the landscape of loss with a skill you do not have to be a widow (or in my case, a widower) to appreciate fully. The persona of these poems is "the last native speaker of the language of our marriage,” a woman who is finding her way even though she can now "only speak grief.” I found myself rooting for her, for her heart, for the survival of her now diminished family "because a person alone is just a person.” This beautiful book has become a part of my own healing.

—Taylor Mali, author of Late Father & Other Poems

"Faith Shearin lifts back the barzakh, the veil between the living and the dead, in her latest and unquestionably best book of poetry. She takes something familiar to all of us—grief—and refashions it, coaxing a beautiful tune from a broken piano."

—B.A. Van Sise, author of Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry

What shall I praise first? Shearin's unparalleled lyric gifts, which shine in poems whose subjects include fly-fishing, mittens, and Amelia Earhart? Or maybe her acquired wisdom, which infuse her poems concerning the premature death of a loved one with a tragic imagination that reminds me of another confessional Massachusetts poet, Robert Lowell? Or perhaps her gorgeous odes to subjects as various as motherhood, travel, and birdsong, where Shearin, equal parts Romantic and Transcendentalist, inspires her readers to never cease marveling at the sheer wonder of the natural world? I can't decide. Instead I'll simply say that Lost Language provides further proof of something I've felt for years: Faith Shearin is America's greatest living poet."

—Kareem Tayyar, author of The Prince of Orange County and Immigrant Songs