Description

 

Snow Over an Origami Heart

by Barbara Ellen Sorensen

In this collection, Barbara Ellen Sorensen interweaves her neurological illness with the landscapes of the natural world. Hear you find poems that are conduits for healing by finding connection with nature, especially the snow, where flurries act as more than just a backdrop. The poet shares her recognition of beauty in the midst of grief and sorrow, where the cold, snow, and the delicacy of the human heart are unfolded and absorbed into life’s milieu.

 

Early Praise

In her opening poem, “Adaptation,” Barbara Ellen Sorensen writes, The neurosurgeon instructs me. And Now in the midst of disease, / this neurologic, shaking illness, / I feel myself becoming what is opposite, / separated or divided… And the body becomes a simple outline / resembling the muted / arrangement of an early morning sky. How extraordinary this opening poem is—and deeply moving as well. As is “Smudge,” in Missouri, with her sister: a smudged emerald that a jeweler once told me / bore that mark of a superior gem. And I was ashamed to recognize beauty in/the clear encumbrances of climate change… How brilliant and also penetrating. In “Watching You Telemark Down Trail Ridge Road,” I thought then / that if we are truly / entering death all along, / could I bear to remember / these encounters as spaces of nature pressed flat / against a window offering / a template of grief? On a more delightful note, in “Travels: 1960-1975,” Sorensen writes, My father loved motion… and the treasured movement that clarified everything: sun and dust settling like allies across an asphalt highway. Years later, I recognized the beauty of car motion, knew it intimately… until, inevitably, we arrived at his seas of heaven.” And in the final poem, “Things I Long to Tell My Schizophrenic Brother” she writes: I will reach across an invisible / realm and pull your body / next to my body, and we can just rest. How very much there is to value in this book.

—VERONICA PATTERSON, Inaugural Poet Laureate, Loveland, CO, Colorado Book Award winner (twice)

In her new chapbook, Snow Over an Origami Heart, Barbara Ellen Sorenson delicately transports us into a world of the most exquisite beauty even as the body shuts down into the cocoon of Parkinson’s disease. One can read these poems simply in awe of Sorenson’s lyrical gifts that can turn the sound of falling ice into a spoon rising from chilled water in a cup, but to do so is to do a disservice to the self. Each poem in this quietly inspiring work is a constellation, a gyre, transposing what is temporal and known and fleeting into the complex shapes of a new world order: the heart, miraculous and moored, folding and refolding itself into the long reckoning.

—KATHRYN WINOGRAD, author, This Visible Speaking: Catching Light through the Camera’s Eye  

Barbara Ellen Sorensen’s luminous new book, Snow Over an Origami Heart, takes poetry to breathtaking lyrical heights while grounded in the physical world. Aching and rhapsodic, these poems address beauty and loss, contending with physical diminishment and personal tragedy. The lines often rise into the key of prayer, especially in poems such as “Disfigurement” and “Journey to Where I First Started.” The poet finds salvation on a dark road, and even the laments find a way to weep, to sing, to dance. This is unforgettable, deeply moving work.

—RACHEL DACUS, author of seven novels and five poetry collections

 

About the Author

Barbara Ellen Sorensen’s three previous books of poetry include: Song from the Deep Middle Brain (Main Street Rag, 2010), Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes (Able Muse Press, 2013), and Mary’s River (Kelsay Books, 2018). Sorensen has a BA in English from the University of Iowa and an MA in creative writing from Regis University in Denver. She is a freelance contributor to the Tribal College Journal and her personal narratives and poems have been published in numerous online and print journals.

Sorensen has been living with Parkinson’s Disease for 24 years and has been blessed with deep brain stimulation (DBS) therapy for 16 years. The DBS has made it possible for Sorensen to live with very few Parkinson symptoms. She is able to keep up with her two rambunctious granddaughters, Emily and Sophia, who affectionately refer to Sorensen as their “robot nana.”

Instagram & Threads: @barbara.e.sorensen

Website: barbellenwrites.com