08/22/2023
Siddhartha On Fire by Arthur Solway, winner of the 2022 chapbook prize! Out now!
Arthur Solway’s poetry is full of knowledge of the world, New Delhi and Kabul, Istanbul and Athens are all here. Here too are the patron saints of our literature—Emily Dickinson and Vasko Popa, John Keats and Beckett. Syntax that is as interested in metaphysics as it is in music is the instrument Solway uses to bring it all together, in lines where breath becomes a searing musical notation. I marvel at how in the book so full of the world it is somehow the most lonely poems that won’t let me go: open the book on pieces like “A Matter of Faith” or “What Is Not” and you will find yourself right in the 21st Century devotional moment, a space where negative theology is the spiritual seeker’s best friend. In those moments, perhaps his most desolate, Solway delivers the music that’s truest, I feel. The result is worth it, because he knows that “there is no ordinary suffering” and that “the world is the end of the world” and yet goes on, undeterred, “again, repaired by a stranger’s kiss.” This is a very beautiful book.
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic
https://www.swanscythepress.com/books/siddhartha_on_fire.html
