Conflicting emotions, emerging from profoundly deep personal spaces, unite the recent poetry by Cynthia Manick and Marcia Karp. In No Sweet Without Brine, Manick draws the reader into her far-from-silent soulful odes and celebratory orations on her journey to young Black womanhood, as she draws the reader to, as Rachel Eliza Griffiths says, “shores and rooftops, reminding us of our calling to leap, fly.” In If by Song, Marcia Karp’s poems, in the words of Edward Mendelson, “have the rare double merit of being precise and passionate, products of a distinctive personal voice that succeeds in speaking for anyone who has ever thought deeply about emotions that are felt deeply. These are poems that transform unhappiness into aesthetic and intellectual pleasure.”

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