What if ruin is a good thing? What if each day is built on the ruin of the one before? What if all our attempts to avoid ruin only make us bitter or closed off from what’s around us? What if only by exploring our ruins do we become human?
            The poems in Otherwise Unseeable examine such questions. It is a poetry full of music and surprise, in voices that are personal, invented, and historical, sometimes belonging to the poet and sometimes to others. Betsy Sholl probes what there is still to learn from the devastations of the twentieth century, and she explores the roots of human envy, greed, and generosity in lively, unexpected ways, enacting the kinds of arguments we have with ourselves: between control and relinquishment, grief and ecstasy, regret and acceptance, faith and skepticism. The end result is a book of verbal wrestling, a girl-Jacob mixing it up with one kind of angel or another, limping for sure, but still blessed.

Winner, Maine Literary Award, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance

Betsy Sholl is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Late Psalm and Don’t Explain, 1997 winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. A former poet laureate of Maine, Sholl teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the MFA Program of Vermont College. She lives in Portland, Maine.