The Nine Senses
Poetry

The Nine Senses

By
Melissa Kwasny
“A book to bind us to the world, and to each other.” —SARAH GRIDLEY
Select Format

In these exquisitely crafted prose poems, Melissa Kwasny examines the world around her with the quiet and profound attention of a poet at the height of her powers.

The questions that have informed much of Kwasny’s previous work—how does one have a relationship with the natural world in our time? What can we learn about being human from non-human forms of life?—find a new urgency in The Nine Senses, as image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision, one that is often dire and surreal. “Perhaps the extra four senses contribute to the surreal in the sense that Breton defined it—as resolution of the real and the dream,” Kwasny writes in the title poem.

Thematically rich and varied, touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection puts Kwasny on the forefront of American poetry, and asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are?

ISBN
9781571314376
Publish Date
Pages
112
Dimensions
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.25 in
Weight
5.9 oz
Cover Art
Author
Photo of Melissa Kwasny, wearing a blue shirt, against a brownish orange background

Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including The Cloud Path, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Pictograph, and The Nine Senses, which contains a set of poems that won the Poetry Society of America’s 2008 Cecil Hemly Award.

Praise and Prizes

  • “Morphing, fleet, intricately paced, register-stretching, comfortable in myriad modes of discourse … A quietly magnificent collection of prose poems that can be read as luminous, rill-fresh engagements with Sufi scholar Henry Corbin’s question: Not ‘what’ but ‘who’ is the earth?”

    Orion

  • “These poems are exceptional for their crisp movement, their clarity, their stunningly original images, and their intimate humanity. To read them is to enter a sensibility so finely tuned that each moment of the experience is achingly real, as though time had slowed and allowed your perceptual apparatus to catch up, as though at last you had been given more life, and new eyes with which to see it. The Nine Senses is a startling and wonderful book.”

    Christopher Howell

  • “In The Nine Senses, Melissa Kwasny follows the path of amor mundi beyond the ‘senses five,’ never parting the real from the dreamt, the dead from the living, the lost from the loved, the solitary from the communal. As with my favorite words, rooms, faces, and flowers, I feel that light is sewn up into these poems. Kwasny has written us a book of charms, in the old sense. A book to bind us to the world, and to each other.”

    Sarah Gridley

    You Might Enjoy

    Based on this book, we recommend you try…
    Pictograph
    Poetry

    Pictograph

    Melissa Kwasny

    Inspired by ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites, this collection captures the intersection of the natural world and sacred art. These poems fill this space with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight suggest the impermanence of life…

    Reading Novalis in Montana
    Poetry

    Reading Novalis in Montana

    Melissa Kwasny

    Drawing inspiration from Novalis, a poet who believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, this collection divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions—indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism…

    Poetry

    You Are Here

    Ada Limón

    A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
    A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” Selection

    Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty…