Star Lake by Arda Collins

Critically acclaimed poet Arda Collins’ second collection, Star Lake, is out now with The Song Cave.

From the publisher: Arda Collins’s second book of poems, Star Lake, is a deeply personal collection that explores the ways our notions of daily life touch the presence of the eternal. With memory as the backdrop of many poems, including the loss of the poet’s parents and her experience growing up in a family of survivors from the Armenian genocide, Collins often overlays images of landscapes, weather, and domestic interiors with a tone of melancholy— “Who is the water and who is the light? / A shiver, a love, one you miss, and a wish.” But Star Lake is also a collection of love poems, poems about the creation of new memories with family, tracing out imaginative shapes for their futures. In this Yale Younger Poets award winner’s new collection, Collins returns with truly unforgettable poems that haunt and comfort.

Hanif Abdurraqib writes, “More than just a book, Star Lake is a tactile experience. A touchable journey wherein each stanza, each image comes to life before a reader. When the wind is summoned in the poem, a breeze blows in through a window you didn’t even know you had open. All to say that this is a book of immense brilliance and immense possibility. Beckoning with new revelations around each corner.”

Click here to read a review by David Woo in Poetry Foundation.

Arda Collins is the author of It Is Daylight (Yale University Press, 2009) and Star Lake (Song Cave, 2022). Alongside being the recipient of some of the most prestigious awards in the literary sphere (Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Poetry Prize and May Sarton Prize), Collins is a lecturer, documentary producer, and frequent contributor to The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker and A Public Space among many others.

Star Lake is available to buy from The Song Cave, Amazon and Blackwells.