Captivity

At once tender and fierce, concise and associative, Laurie Sheck’s Captivity charts and explores the textures and movements of mind in her gorgeous, long-lined poetry. Placed at intervals throughout the book are poems the author calls “Removes,” which take their initial impulse from American captivity narratives and constitute a profoundly felt inquiry into what is familiar and what is strange, what it means to be displaced and radically apart, and how disruption itself becomes its own kind of opportunity. The poems describe a psychic territory both desolate and exultant, as Sheck embraces the fragmentary, yet stays alert to what remains “mysteriously standing.” She writes, “Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the break and fledof things inside it. ” In Captivity, Sheck illuminates this shadow-thought world that governs what we are and attains provocative glimpses of the fluid self.

Praise & Reviews

“One of the most accomplished lyric poets writing in America today…the music of Sheck’s language is never less than exquisite.”
—G.C. Waldrep, Boston Review

“Sheck follows Black Series with another bewitching collection… responding to American captivity narratives in a series of exquisite and haunting poems she calls ‘Removes,’ tracking a captive’s journey across a somber land and through a wilderness of feelings.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“Captivity is nothing less than a cartography of the undiscovered self. And the project is made more ambitious by the purity of Sheck’s lyric. From the flashes of color that animate the mental landscape to the wind-shaken trees that figure for thought with its “thick wilderness of branchings” (“Rope-burn”), Sheck’s distillation and lightness of touch are wonderful.”
—Benjamin Grossberg Antioch review

“These lyrics bring fresh insight out of numbness and joy out of sorrow.”
—The New Leader