SOON AND WHOLLY
Wesleyan Poetry Series
September 4, 2024
Idra Novey's first collection in a decade, since Patricia Smith chose Exit, Civilian for the National Poetry Series, brings a lyric intimacy to the extremes of our era. The poems juxtapose sweltering days raising children in a city with moments from a rural childhood roaming free in the woods, providing a bridge between those often polarized realities. Novey's spare, contemporary fables move across the Americas, from a woman housesitting in central Chile, surrounded by encroaching fires, to a man in New York about to give birth to a panda.
Other poems return to the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia, where Novey revisits the roads and creeks of her childhood: "Maybe we knew we only appeared/to be floating, but soon and wholly/we'd go under." Like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson, Novey draws from the well of her work translating myriad authors, from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector to Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, and from her own award-winning novels. These are deeply lived poems, evoking both a singular life and the shared urgencies of our time, a collection of great inventiveness and wit, conjuring our "bit part in the history of the future."
Praise for Soon and wholly
"Like her translations of the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector and the Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Idra Novey’s third full-length collection renders variations of the unknowable...Novey brings her own world into focus here, with a subtly lyrical directness that motions from the personal to the mortal to the global."
—David Woo, LitHub
"The poems in Soon and Wholly takes readers through the hot summer days of city-life and the carefree childhood experiences in the countryside, juxtaposing two different lifestyles and setting the stage for a collection that spans years and miles...Novey’s collection highlights a deep love for the written and natural worlds."
—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
"Each poem builds on the next, moving toward a seeing that relies on trust of self, feelings and the peculiar...The reader trusts the poet's telling, which is deployed with care and deliberateness...inventive and surprising."
—Booklist
"I was nowhere I had ever before been, reading Idra Novey's remarkable third collection, Soon and Wholly, though a world I recognized was everywhere in its pages. Here, ekphrasis, epistolary, and lyric sequence masterfully trace, over hours and months, the daily textures of experience—"the particles of our lives"—where "meaning is a hunger" we do not expect to sate. With a poet's restraint, a translator's discernment, and a novelist's devotion, Novey has gifted us a book of formidable intelligence, humor, grief, artistic kinship, and unfettered imagination that is uniquely and wholly hers. Read it right away."
—Charif Shanahan, author of Trace Evidence
"In Idra Novey's Soon and Wholly, the language of fables, with their strangeness, timelessness, and sense of foreboding, meets the world we live in right now—a world on fire, a world fracked and broken, a world in which we 'snack on data' and 'sipconditioned air.' And like fables, these poems are part cautionary tale, part imaginative alchemy, and wholly brilliant. I don't know how Novey does it—'This blue work. /This gluing of impossibilities.'—but I'll read this book again and again, eager to learn."
—Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Goldenrod
"With Soon and Wholly, Idra Novey turns the familiar inside out and dwells in the strangeness of the world. Bearing the spoils from her travails as translator and novelist, she returns to her native genre of poetry to regale us with wit, wisdom and an open heart tempered by the itinerant work of her imagination. This collection is more home than homecoming. From one poem to the next, she's off again, sweeping us in the updraft of her flight, taking our breath away."
—Gregory Pardlo, author of Digest
"In these marvellous poems, the poet's perception is the keenest of instruments, revealing a gorgeously unexpected cross-section of experience. We perceive – as in Novey's resonant duets with artist Erica Baum's collages — the close-packed layers of parenthood and politics and ecology and fear and language and grief and tenderness. A poet of lapidary gifts, Idra Novey lays bare the startling juxtapositions and poignant adhesions that lie hidden under the skin of dailiness. These poems are effortlessly original and utterly indispensable."
—Monica Youn, author of From From