Deep Gossip

Throughout her seven critically acclaimed collections, Sidney Wade has established herself as a poet with a serious but light touch, one capable of the clarity and inventiveness it takes to work a problem both to pleasure and to resolution. Playing with and challenging form in all directions, the 27 new and 96 selected poems in Deep Gossip bristle with a sly wit that trips and delights the reader.

Wade disguises some sonnets by arranging their perfect rhymes so they're not immediately audible. She composes other sonnets in dimeter, rather than pentameter; works in syllabics; includes one poem written in the octave stanza form invented by John Berryman for his book-length "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet"; and entrances readers with her long and skinny couplets, a form she perfected in her last collection, Bird Book. Inspired by landscape, language, music, and living things, as well as the occasional bout of political outrage, Deep Gossip is a smart collection, deceptively so.

Praise for Other Books by Sidney Wade

"The quick, closely observed poems in Sidney Wade's beguiling Bird Book move from page to page like their subjects--in flight, on air, a murmuration sweeping across the horizon."--William Souder

"Sidney Wade's linguistic and philosophical turns in Bird Book confirm that she is both the supreme heir to Wallace Stevens and one of the most original poets in the language."--Randall Mann

"This is a beautiful, wise, and timely collection."--Daniel Anderson

"As impressive and thrillingly exact as these poems are concerning matters ornithological, it is the exquisite music --'earth-sprung, bright, and resonant'--of Wade's radically short line that so enchants me, the free play of interlinear rhyme, phonemic harmonies, and small bursts of metrical rhythms that yield more vitality and delight than any gathering of poems I have encountered in a very long time."--B. H. Fairchild

"Her poems are]... a particular and splendid instance of what Hopkins meant by 'poetry proper, the language of inspiration.' "--Richard Howard

Poet and translator Sidney Wade is professor emerita of creative writing at the University of Florida. She is the author of seven collections of poetry: Bird Book, Straits & Narrows, Stroke, Celestial Bodies, Empty Sleeves, Green, and From Istanbul/İstanbul’dan.