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ben_miller's review
5.0
From my review of Sky Songs in the Colorado Review:
That our world is broken—sundered by pandemic, climate crisis, race and class oppression, chasms of political discord—seems beyond dispute. What is equally clear is that we have no choice but to live in, and try to love, that world. In that light, although Jennifer Sinor’s new collection of personal essays was written over a span of fifteen years, it has arrived just in time.
The appeal of Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World is summed up by one of Sinor’s students, quoted within the text: “When you write about something true, something real, the reader can’t look away.” To this observation I would add that the true and the real, in holding your gaze, force open a space in your mind—in a way, they break you. And into that broken place comes rushing the wild stuff of being human: love, fear, devotion, rage, astonishment.
It is this kind of brokenness that Sinor seems to be talking about: not a brokenness beyond repair, or even necessarily to be repaired, but the brokenness that we all live with, every day. As she has written elsewhere, “It is our moments of brokenness that define our spirit.”
More on the CR website.
That our world is broken—sundered by pandemic, climate crisis, race and class oppression, chasms of political discord—seems beyond dispute. What is equally clear is that we have no choice but to live in, and try to love, that world. In that light, although Jennifer Sinor’s new collection of personal essays was written over a span of fifteen years, it has arrived just in time.
The appeal of Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World is summed up by one of Sinor’s students, quoted within the text: “When you write about something true, something real, the reader can’t look away.” To this observation I would add that the true and the real, in holding your gaze, force open a space in your mind—in a way, they break you. And into that broken place comes rushing the wild stuff of being human: love, fear, devotion, rage, astonishment.
It is this kind of brokenness that Sinor seems to be talking about: not a brokenness beyond repair, or even necessarily to be repaired, but the brokenness that we all live with, every day. As she has written elsewhere, “It is our moments of brokenness that define our spirit.”
More on the CR website.
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