Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
As When Waking

As When Waking

Schonning, Daniel

Paperback

Series: Phoenix Poets

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $18.00

ISBN10: 022684384X
ISBN13: 9780226843841
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Oct 1 2025
Pages: 64
Weight: 0.37
Height: 0.29 Width: 6.57 Depth: 9.50
Language: English
An exploration of poetic form, centering on the alphabet as both its medium and constraint.

The poems of Daniel Schonning's debut collection range from personal examinations of childhood suffering and loss of faith to deep observations of images and objects to the foreclosure of a family home, a father estranged by addiction, mallards on a frozen pond, flowering bindweed, and a door to the underworld. With all its component pieces, As When Waking aims to apprentice itself to the medium of letters, inviting readers to listen and learn from the systems and symmetries of alphabets.

Schonning employs structural paradigms to explore themes of poetic lineage. Twenty-six of the poems in this collection are abecedarians, a form where the opening letter of each line advances through the alphabet, with the lines of the first poem proceeding alphabetically from A-Z, while those of the second poem move from B-A, and then C-B, all the way to Z-A. This structure is tied to Jewish mystic texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah, which probes the relationship between the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the world they inhabit.

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