2019 Release - Finalist for the Julie Suk Award

“Tina Schumann’s Praising the Paradox is a rich guidebook for a life—a grand companion. These deeply satisfying poems, with their lush images and fluid sound movements, unfold in elegance, settling the spirit. In every stanza, Schumann’s honest voice feels compelling and humble— ‘what radiant resignation / to be so much / less than I / could have ever hoped for’—offering largeness of vision, grace, and enormous reading pleasure. ‘I simply left / blank spaces along the way; an ellipse here, a dash there.’ Nothing forced, nothing labored. What a treat.”—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2010–2015) and author of 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East and Voices in the Air.

“What I admire most in Praising the Paradox is the resilience throughout and an awareness of the common world that both comforts and devastates. These poems navigate a landscape of loss where what goes on is the sway of stoplights, the waitress with her coffee-pot suspended in mid-air, the everyday moments that gather momentum and make a life. These poems celebrate the small gestures, carrying pain alongside joy, reminding us we are alive.” —DORIANNE LAUX author of The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Prize, and Facts About the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award.

“Tina Schumann’s stunning new collection is extraordinary in its intelligence. She has organized her poems by locating the innumerable paradoxes in our lives, in our minds, in the world. Her book is brilliantly unique and, I dare say, unrepeatable; she owns this territory. And what is so important about a paradox? The answer is that paradox is what the world is made of. The other (necessary) ingredient here is feeling. Praising the Paradox will make you feel, think, and reflect. Schumann’s lines will resonate in your heart. They will resonate in mine forever.”—KELLY CHERRY Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012) and author of Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Poem.