The Dictionary of Shapes
“Both playful and earnest, the interplay between shape, etymology, and poem create a delightful triangulation that kept me lingering and flicking back and forth, which is what I hope for most of all from a good book. This is a potent, mysterious book, and I know I will return to it often.”
Elizabeth Bradfield, author of SOFAR
What is the sound of a shape? Verb and reverb? Frequency and phrase? Erin Malone and Pat Sonnino gift us this atlas of possibilities, this vocabulary of shared experience, mapping the geometries that haunt our dreams and populate our desires, “like an argument / I had with the wind.” If words themselves are shapes in air, laced with the vibrato or legacy of emotional life, The Dictionary of Shapes makes visible, in pithy brushstrokes and aphoristic ripples, our elemental hopes and fears.
Erin Malone is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Site of Disappearance, Hover, and What Sound Does It Make. Her honors include the Robert Creeley Memorial Award, the Coniston Prize, and residency support from Anderson Center, Jentel, Kimmel-Harding Nelson Center, Monson Arts, and Ucross. Erin’s poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Field, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Swing, West Branch, and many other places. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for Okay Donkey and as poet laureate of Bainbridge Island, WA.
Patricia Sonnino is an artist living and working in San Francisco. With degrees in Architecture from Washington University, she taught design at the Boston Architectural Center and was a visiting artist at Fort Lewis College in Colorado and at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. Patricia has participated in solo and group exhibitions at Fort Lewis College, Merge Gallery in Stone Ridge, NY, and at the University of North Carolina. In the San Francisco Bay area, her work has been exhibited at the DeYoung Museum, Bryant Street Gallery, Gearbox Gallery, Slate Gallery, MAX Occupancy Art, and theMarin Museum of Contemporary Art. Her residency awards include The Morris Graves Foundation, Willapa Bay AiR, Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, Playa, and Penland.
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