them that slept.jpg
them that slept.jpg

Them That Slept: New & Selected Poems

$19.95

by Larissa Szporluk

A selection of poems that form a narrative about psychological and spiritual somnambulance in our current age and the ever-urgent need to wake up.

In Them That Slept, Larissa Szporluk gathers three decades of work into a single incandescent arc—poems that braid feminist theology, eros, and myth into a lyric of fierce awakening. Borrowing its title from First Corinthians—“the firstfruits of them that slept”—this collection asks what it means to rise, not into certainty, but into desire, voice, and embodiment. Here, virgins become saints and saints become women of appetite. Daughters speak back to fathers. The sea mothers and devours. Joan of Arc lingers in her cell. Venus tweets. The body is never merely symbolic—it is radiant, wounded, knowing. Szporluk’s women are not passive figures in inherited narratives; they are theologians of touch, architects of longing, midwives of their own transformations. 

Across selections from six previous books and a powerful suite of new poems, Szporluk reimagines sacred language as intimate speech. Biblical cadences shimmer against domestic interiors, fields, bedrooms, and storm skies. Eros is not an ornament but a form of knowledge; faith is not obedience but risk. These are poems that refuse to sleep through history. They burn toward revelation— sensual, subversive, and alive.

by Larissa Szporluk

A selection of poems that form a narrative about psychological and spiritual somnambulance in our current age and the ever-urgent need to wake up.

In Them That Slept, Larissa Szporluk gathers three decades of work into a single incandescent arc—poems that braid feminist theology, eros, and myth into a lyric of fierce awakening. Borrowing its title from First Corinthians—“the firstfruits of them that slept”—this collection asks what it means to rise, not into certainty, but into desire, voice, and embodiment. Here, virgins become saints and saints become women of appetite. Daughters speak back to fathers. The sea mothers and devours. Joan of Arc lingers in her cell. Venus tweets. The body is never merely symbolic—it is radiant, wounded, knowing. Szporluk’s women are not passive figures in inherited narratives; they are theologians of touch, architects of longing, midwives of their own transformations. 

Across selections from six previous books and a powerful suite of new poems, Szporluk reimagines sacred language as intimate speech. Biblical cadences shimmer against domestic interiors, fields, bedrooms, and storm skies. Eros is not an ornament but a form of knowledge; faith is not obedience but risk. These are poems that refuse to sleep through history. They burn toward revelation— sensual, subversive, and alive.

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About the Author

Larissa Szporluk is a poet and professor of poetry at Bowling Green State University. She did her graduate studies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA. Szporluk is the author of six books, including Dark Sky Question, winner of the Barnard Prize; Isolato, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; and Virginals, winner of the Burnside Review Press Prize. Aiding the completion of those books were grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ohio Arts Council.

Advanced Praise

“Szporluk acknowledges and explores the dissonance of art and love, in narrow, unruly lines that are disarmingly direct, except the direction is towards a kind of madness. It’s a relentless and overwhelming lyricism, persuasive and unforgettable.” —Ed Skoog

“Szporluk’s poems have a wildness that is wholly her own, though Plath’s rocking rhythms and Dickinson’s sacred profanity lurk in their company.” —Becca Klaver

“These poems traffic in an archetypal vale. Nimble and volatile, the thin lines dagger your eyes to the page. We are left unfettered as the great spool unwinds. Dislocated and out of time, nowhere is no better place to be, no paradise pact, each child’s lap an ossuary for parent’s bones, that is, should anyone outlast these madrigals. Sing this drowned book’s boozy-jazz betrayals, if you dare, to your lovelorn kiddies, your fleeced flocks. By hook or by crook, the rapids ridden, no one will ever thank you enough for the paddles spared, unmoored as we all are from our upturned canoes.” —Timothy Liu

“Something of the philologist invests these passages with linguistic trouble and gives to their cool surfaces a suggestion of considerable subterranean fire. One is grateful both for the threat of that real heat and for the uncommon chance to take pleasure in it.” —Scott Cairns

“This book is dark. The syntax-riddles sound like Emily Dickinson knew about them, but couldn’t until now, across decades and bodies, admit to them.” —Heidi Johannesen Poon

“Larissa Szporluk has created a new world of syntax and tone. Her poetry, free of narcissism and autobiography, indentured to the irrational and oblique, is made from a displaced language ‘shaking to remember where it had owned.’ I’ve missed this feral fineness in poetry.” —Alice Fulton

Format: Paperback
Published: September 2026
ISBN: 9781961209671