SKY SONGS

An English professor and nonfiction writer reflects on the inseparability of beauty and brokenness in human life.

Between 1922 and 1931, photographer Alfred Stieglitz shot hundreds of cloud images that Sinor sees as “sky songs” “meant to pull the viewer into a vortex of light, merging the immediate and the transcendent.” In this book, the author follows Stieglitz’s artistic lead by taking “snapshots” of different parts of her life and probing them for meaning. In “Headwaters,” she grapples with an extraordinary synchronicity of events: On the day a beloved uncle died on an Alaskan river boat trip, her first son was conceived. Life and death, Sinor writes, joined in a way that was at once tragic and miraculous. In another essay, the author muses on the parallels between two unrelated but intertwined episodes. At Utah State, where she teaches creative writing, painful stories by a closeted gay student and a lesbian who “prayed daily to God to make her straight” made her uncomfortably aware of “the unchallenged homophobia” espoused by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “theocracy” in which she lived. When LDS missionaries visited her home in an attempt to convert her, Sinor openly expressed disgust for their bigotry only to realize later that her anger came from the same place as the homophobia she excoriates. The author then explores her evolving relationship to religion. Once a fervent believer in a God, she eventually became an atheist. But marriage to a poet who believed that clouds were “proof enough…of the Divine” and a deepening of her practice of yoga during a three-month visit to India moved her away from “the sterile shore of atheism” and toward belief in “the existence of a force beyond what [she could] name.” Sinor’s skills in interweaving different stories within the essays and finding the hidden connections between them are evident throughout. Together, they work to create a tapestry that is both searching and insightful.

A lyrically profound collection.