This Eye Is for Seeing Stars
poems by Christine Poreba

Winner of The Orison Poetry Prize, selected by Pádraig Ó Tuama
 
*available for pre-order*
 
Orison Books
paper  /  76 pp.  /  $18.00
ISBN: 978-1-949039-59-7
Distributed to the trade by Itasca Books
952-223-8373  /  orders@itascabooks.com
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
 
ABOUT THE BOOK
 
“The body…keeps / being brought / further into time, must reconfigure here / with there.” So states the poem “This Eye” from This Eye Is for Seeing Stars, a book that puts time and one’s relationship to it under a microscope. These poems offer a mother's tender ruminations as she watches her child encounter the complexities of the world, moving through cities in the speaker’s present and past, through loss and a child’s imagination. This Eye Is for Seeing Stars depicts a world in which nothing holds still and the everyday moments of our lives serve as a testament to our common humanity and to seeing the world anew both through and because of another person’s eyes. 
 
PRAISE
 
“This Eye Is for Seeing Stars has a clue in its title: seeing. Christine Poreba trains her gaze on birds, family, city, self and change, and by this practice—looking at, looking to, looking through—she shows us what poetry can do. Regret is paired with art: ‘I always knew I’d miss the live oak / I lived beside in Florida / for fifteen years’; and nature is not tame ‘when my son looks up at the beautiful clouds we name / anything we want he says he sees a gun…’ Poreba's lyric voice, style, and point of view—as well as her capacity to sustain attention through poems of varying length—kept me returning to these powerful poems.”
—Pádraig Ó Tuama, judge of The 2023 Orison Poetry Prize
 
“Christine Poreba’s collection hums with splendid clarity, reminding us that our most ardent philosophers of time’s passing are mothers watching their children fall in and out of love with rocks. Her work draws us into a bittersweet desire to return, to stay, to slow. Even when we weren’t intending to hold it so tenderly, in these poems, the memory of a flaming cardinal or scatter of snow inspires us to revel in the vastness of our ordinary lives.”
—Natalie Graham, author of Begin with a Failed Body
 
“Christine Poreba’s This Eye Is for Seeing Stars is filled with luminous glimpses of family life in all its joys and terrors—from electrodes taped to a newborn’s tiny chest, to the arc of a wiffle ball as it flies out over a stone wall, to a mother’s secret longing for her own past, and ‘the wildness of things’ half-tamed. These are beautiful, delicate poems, from a writer dedicated to the holiness of the heart’s affections.”
—Patrick Phillips, author of Song of the Closing Doors and Elegy for a Broken Machine
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 
Christine Poreba is a New Yorker who lived for more than a decade in North Florida and now lives in Chicagoland, where she works in a public library. Her first poetry collection, Rough Knowledge, won The Philip Levine Prize. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies and numerous journals, including Barrow Street, The Southern Review, The Cimarron Review, and The Sun.