About the Book

Selected by Heather McNaugher, contest judge for Coal Hill Review’s 2017 Chapbook Prize. Sonia Greenfield’s poetry chapbook American Parable is a portrait of America’s current political and cultural landscape. Greenfield’s candor is a light that helps us make sense of a murky world.

Praise for American Parable

This timely and imaginative collection by Sonia Greenfield reads like a seer’s post-apocalyptic vision of America. Her poems are lucid, emotionally evocative, and wise. In “Ghost Ship,” the speaker advises us that “when a swirl of colored spotlights sets you / spinning, you have to dance as if / the very act of living depends on it.” American Parable is simultaneously dance and doom—and spin you will.
—David Hernandez

These poems had me at Lakshmi Singh, one of a dozen or so daily-life characters who invite us into the dicey, irresistible country of American Parable.
—Heather McNaugher

By turns both playful and menacing, Sonia Greenfield’s American Parable achieves the near impossible, giving voice and vision to our current politics, offering one roadmap for making sense of our harrowing times. With startling candor, outrage, and a lusty, full-hearted, maternal sense of calling, Greenfield refuses to be silenced or to live in fear. Migrants, refugees, out-of-work clowns, gay men lost to the plague years, missing children, drowned monuments, dead and dying animals: all populate Greenfield’s ghostly, apocalyptic landscape. But they are amplified by Greenfield’s audacious love, imaginative wit, and determined singing: “when music flares up and takes a hold of you,” Greenfield writes, “you have to dance as if / the very act of living depends on it.”
—David J. Daniels

Sonia Greenfield was born and raised in Peekskill, New York, and her book, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of places, including in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and Willow Springs. Her collection […]

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