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"Despite the rapids these poems navigate, each poem has an internal cohesiveness that cannot have been easy to achieve."--Dana Wilde, Bangor Daily News
"The human voice is captured beautifully as one can almost hear the fist pounding the podium—or kitchen table—at the end of each line.”—Gently Read Literature
"Nowhere else in American poetry do I come across a passion, a cunning, and a joy greater than his. And a deadly accuracy. I see him as one of the supreme poets of his generation."–Gerald Stern
The poems in True Faith are earthy, lyrical, honest, and empathic in a style that is both gritty and urbane. With wry humor, Ira Sadoff's latest collection addresses family, faith, and the quiet joys of aging.
Ira Sadoff currently teaches in the MFA program at Drew University and serves as the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts professor of English at Colby College in Maine.
"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
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.
I.
True Faith
In Madrid
American
Lament
Down by the Old Mill Stream
The Sound and the Fury (1991)
Oyster Bay
Apologia
My Country
Surely the Wind
Blue Catamarans
Mood Rings as Foreign Policy
Water Musik
Worry Fills the Brim of my Hat
Padlocked
Adam
In Virginia
In a Southern Climate
Dies Irae
II.
MAYBE
“Orphans”
“Question”
“Objectively, in Church,”
“A Mighty Fortress”
“Diagnosis”
“The War”
“Chamber Pot”
“Like Magic”
“This Morning”
“Stirhouse”
“The Gift”
“Elegy”
III.
America II
TRUE FAITH
Table of Contents (continued)
The Aftermath
Lapses
Before
Id
Memoir
While in Brooklyn
For Beauty
What I Meant
In my Little Paradise
Listen
Once I Could Say
Ex-Wives
Happenstance
To the Gods
The Numbness
Because We Have Failed So Often
At the Polynesian Paradise in the Mall of America
Dispel Me
Revival
Heavens