True Faith

Ira Sadoff: Ira Sadoff is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Barter, and Grazing (U. of Illinois), a novel, O. Henry prize-winning short stories, and The Ira Sadoff Reader (a collection of stories, poems, and essays about contemporary poetry). He is the recipient of a Creative Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and a Fellowship from the Guggenheim foundation. His poems have been widely anthologized, including in the Harper Anthology of American Literature, and The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Great American Prose Poems, and The Best American Poetry 2002 and 2008. His newest critical book, History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of Culture, on the relationship between poetry and culture, was published in 2009 by the University of Iowa Press. Former poetry editor of The Antioch Review and co-founder of The Seneca Review, he has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the MFA programs at the University of Virginia, Warren Wilson College, and currently teaches at Colby College and the MFA program at Drew University.

"The remembering minds in these poems bounce from one probing question or self-abrasive feeling to another with a sort of Kafka-like cohesive disjointure...There is something reassuring and anxious about the fashioning of coherence out of utter confusion."--BDN Maine Living "And rarely does a speaker feel so complete on the page. He [Sadoff] operates with a clear confidence of a man who trusts his memory, yet is tempered with humility and a pointed self-awareness that includes an acute awareness of irony and humor as the profane and sacred coexist, not on the same planet or even city, but in the same room. There's an honest volatility that makes these poems explode off the page, quickly leaping from lyric grace to a swagger and then back to a peaceful confession..." --storySouth An Academy of American Poets' Notable Book of 2012, True Faith, "poses questions about happiness and resilience...[and] often gesture towards a common humanity...[in which] moments of divinity emerge in unexpected places...to Sadoff, it is imagination that allows faith, fosters possibility, and evidences beauty," --Claudia Rankine "Poems that visibly grapple with difficult subjects, and that often do so with language that cuts roughly to the bone..." - West Branch Wired

• Table of contentsI.True Faith In MadridAmerican LamentDown by the Old Mill StreamThe Sound and the Fury (1991)Oyster BayApologiaMy CountrySurely the WindBlue CatamaransMood Rings as Foreign PolicyWater MusikWorry Fills the Brim of my HatPadlockedAdamIn VirginiaIn a Southern ClimateDies IraeII.MAYBE“Orphans”“Question” “Objectively, in Church,”“A Mighty Fortress”“Diagnosis”“The War”“Chamber Pot”“Like Magic”“This Morning”“Stirhouse”“The Gift”“Elegy”III.America IITRUE FAITH Table of Contents (continued)The AftermathLapsesBeforeIdMemoirWhile in BrooklynFor BeautyWhat I MeantIn my Little ParadiseListenOnce I Could SayEx-WivesHappenstanceTo the GodsThe NumbnessBecause We Have Failed So OftenAt the Polynesian Paradise in the Mall of AmericaDispel MeRevivalHeavens