The High Shelf

About Nadia Colburn

Nadia Colburn’s work appears in American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Spirituality & Health Magazine, among others. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University, and is a Kundalini yoga instructor, a student of Thich Nhat Hahn, and a social justice and environmental activist. The founder of Align Your Story classes and coaching for women, she lives in Cambridge, MA.

Praise for The High Shelf

The High Shelf follows the life of a mind as it becomes more and more aware of threats that mean the end of the natural world. And yet these are love poems that call out to one whom the speaker hopes can inhabit that very same world: “O: little one: all this that is not mine/to give you, what will I give you?” What a tender book! What an example of how to maintain tenderness while telling the truth!
—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

“Music,” said Victor Hugo, “expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.” Nadia Colburn’s poems live in that zone, equally at home in the familiar world and one in which human language falls away, giving us startling glimpses into another kind of perception. The High Shelf is an intimate record of hard spiritual and intellectual work. Spare, brilliant, and open-hearted, these poems do what we most need art to do in this perilous age: they show how the mind invents both itself and its world, and thus where our responsibility lies. This is a book that will reward both readers of poetry and those seeking insight into suffering and resilience. An exhilarating read.
—Chase Twichell, author of Things As It Is

Reading Colburn’s poems, I picture a wall of dioramas in which every object is a thought and every thought is an object. Holes dug in the sand become “spaces for the soul to fit into” and lemons toggle between representing the body, the intellect, and the soul. Likewise, these spare, philosophical poems are as likely to make the mysterious explicable as they are to make the mundane miraculous. Colburn quietly insists on multiplicity—the world can be both “a box with a mirror,” and “a high shelf”—and these poems compel us to reflect and reach alongside her.
—Matthea Harvey, author of If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?

In Colburn’s stunning debut, a motionless turbulence intersects with the fluency of nature, beauty, and personal awareness. From within this liminal state, pastoral elegance turns on itself and silence signifies both displaced traumatic experience and a search beyond and through that trauma. The task of the self, in a landscape that is dangerous and endangered, is to come to terms with body and spirit, and Colburn is a trustworthy guide.
—Andrea Baker, author of Each Thing Unburied Is Broken