Sorority of Stillness: A Gallery of Women in Art

by Judith Sornberger

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Sorority of Stillness: A Gallery of Women in Art is a collection of ekphrastic poems that imaginatively enter into conversation with paintings and sculptures of girls and women. These poems consider the ways that art celebrates women and how that is expressed differently by artists of different genders and cultures. Questions of oppression and freedom are raised here, as are the ways that art leads us into spiritual questions. “Many excellent poems have emerged from the current intense interest in ekphrastic poetry, but I would argue that few, if any, poets have imbued this species of poem with as much native force and feeling, to say nothing of intellectual acuity, as has Judith Sornberger.” (Clif Mason)

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-962082-66-2 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2025935254

Released April 15, 2025  |  Copyright 2025

102 pages; 28 full-color images

Author Biography

A Nebraska native, Judith Sornberger is a poet, essayist, memoirist, journalist, playwright, and teacher who lives on the side of a mountain outside Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. Her other full-length poetry collections are I Call to You from Time (Wipf & Stock), Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas (Shanti Arts), Practicing the World (CavanKerry Press), and Open Heart (Calyx Books). Her six chapbooks include The Book of Muses (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her prose memoir, The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany, is also from Shanti Arts. She first taught writing in Nebraska prisons and is a professor emerita of Mansfield University, where she founded the Women’s Studies Program. Today she teaches online poetry writing classes and leads in-person workshops.

Endorsements

“Many excellent poems have emerged from the current intense interest in ekphrastic poetry, but I would argue that few, if any, poets have imbued this species of poem with as much native force and feeling, to say nothing of intellectual acuity, as has Judith Sornberger. Her new collection, The Sorority of Stillness: A Gallery of Women in Art, is at once a summit of the genre and a keen distillation of her decades-long dedication to feminist scholarship and poetry. Sornberger vividly calls forth the artworks that are the inspirations for her poems, but she doesn’t content herself simply with mimesis. She also presents a keen and compelling critique of the male gaze and masculine perspective featured in many of these works. Her poems on the works of Henry Moore and Vermeer brilliantly evince the theoretical precision and power that a feminist poet can bring to bear on canonical male artists. Other poems, such as ‘The Boating Party,’ construct an entirely convincing feminist narrative from Mary Cassatt’s painting. Perhaps the most affecting poem in this collection, ‘Janice Joplin Forever Stamp,’ serves as a dual elegy for Joplin and for Sornberger’s sister, Jen. It is exquisite. If you’re in search of poems as intellectually stimulating as they are verbally evocative and memorable, look no further. The Sorority of Stillness is the book you’re seeking. It is a triumph.”
—Clif Mason, author of Knocking the Stars Senseless and The Book of Night & Waking

“In Sorority of Stillness, Judith Sornberger engages in a complex conversation with images of women in visual art and the images women artists have made of, and for, themselves. ‘My imagination,’ she tells us, ‘paints us into sisters.’ Sornberger views a variety of paintings, sculptures, collages, and photographs by both famous and lesser-known artists with the eyes of someone ‘wide awake and hungry / for amazement.’ The poet, like the artists and images she celebrates, allows for ‘the wild intrusion of the unexpected,’ and invites us to experience that amazement along with her.”
—Grace Bauer, author of Beholding Eye and Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems

“Come, enter these vivid, what-if worlds of women, past and present! Poet Judith Sornberger time-travels via works of art, responding with candor, curiosity, and transporting flair. We are swept into soulful, shifting questions, emotions, and roles akin to our own. Time winks. The here-and-now resonates while evoking an ageless sisterhood. Deftly illuminated like a sacred text, this collection enacts what the poet bids us: ‘Be one thing all the way through: / . . . true.’”
—Laurie Klein, author of House of 49 Doors: Entries in a Life

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