The second in our cohort of 2022 Patrons’ Prize Winners, this elegiac cycle of poems powerfully reflects the rhythms of life and loss, like waves on the ocean, and explores the depths of what it means to be at home—both in the world and within one’s own body.
Donna Steiner grew up collecting specimens of seashells and studying the patterns of the ocean waves on the Jersey Shore—the same waves which dispersed both of her parents’ ashes less than six weeks apart, becoming, in effect, another kind of home. In the years that followed, she dedicated a part of herself to these studies of the ocean, and it was the life found therein which inspired much of the imagery found in Part Horror, Part Magic, Holy Ourselves. As a person suffering an autoimmune disorder during the Covid-19 pandemic, Steiner also began to observe reflections of her oceanic studies within her own life, which coalesced in the moments of “part horror, part magic” which make up these poems. Of the collection, she writes:
“My understanding of what it means to inhabit a body – the pleasures and perils of being a body in proximity to other bodies – continues to deepen. The complexities of physicality, vulnerability, and mercy become more urgent. But also present are consolations: moments of near holiness we are graced with again and again. I study those moments the way I studied the waves; I seek them with the vigilance of the child who sought along the shore the most precious fragments of shells.”
Donna Steiner is an author and visual artist whose work explores themes of humanhood and the natural world. Her essays and poems, including The Sun, Fourth Genre, and Full Grown People examine the ways personal experiences interact with landscape, family history, and time.
Originally from New Jersey, Steiner has taught creative writing and literary citizenship at the State University of New York at Oswego since 2003. She has received numerous honors for her work, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature.
