Letter High

Letter High is a series of essays tracing the nature of poetic knowledge, distinguishing between the surface rewards of the world from what a poet really gains from her process. Many of the pieces are improvisational, where insights come to the poet in the moment of the writing. Many of the truths are long known and arduously achieved, through decades of dedication. There are also several pieces on poets, and on poetry and music. These paint a clearer picture of the part poetry plays in the world.

The volume closes with 21 new poems, each a four-line quatrain stanza, plus another poem for the author's therapist, about her role in her process, to conclude it. "The proper response to a poem is another poem," Wallace Stevens wrote. The 21 poems are a pacific reflection on a career of poetic evolution, of which the form of the new pattern is another evolution.

Sophia Marshall is a perceptual poet, characterized by her treatment of the senses. She has been compared to e.e. cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and Sappho. She is a credentialed journalist and music critic, as well as a poet, with credits in several jazz journals and other music publications, and she has published letters on politics in The Boston Phoenix. She has a blog, The Flash Boston (theflashboston.com), covering Boston music and culture. She is a transgender woman. She lives in Boston.