Solitary Spin
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SOLITARY SPIN
Within Barbara Sabol’s thought-provoking debut Solitary Spin, it’s life on Earth that proves to be inscrutable, and so this poet looks up and writes with expertise and lyric yearning for the more stable heavens, where stars, moon, and Mars seem magnificently familiar—and unlike the not-so-distant past with its rotary phones, backyard bomb shelters, and family so far beyond ken.
–Kathleen Driskell, Blue Etiquette: Poems
SOLITARY SPIN explores a fascination of space for its mystery and as a fantasized place of escape from the bleak dailiness and restraints of a small-town existence. The poems in SOLITARY SPIN explore the themes of childhood, fueled by the non/existence of a twin sister (Frankie) as the sustaining metaphor for loss and one's ultimate singularity in the world, enacted in human and creaturely guises. The coming-of-age focus develops in a challenging but rich blue-collar upbringing, and the universal dysfunctions of families shaped by the cold war culture of the '50's and '60's. The final sections arc to an owning of regrets, the fruits of inevitable losses, the elusive balance of sadness and contentment―in the adult speaker. These poems explore how we balance sadness and joy, beauty and its transience, in a fully realized earthly existence.