Them That Slept

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.

Larissa Szporluk is the author of six books of poetry, including Dark Sky Question, winner of the Barnard Prize, Isolato (Iowa Book Prize), and Virginals, which won the Burnside Review Press Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts grant and received graduate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Virginia. A former professor of poetry and ongoing mother of three, she now farms in northern Italy.