Kid with Satellite. Daniel Schonning. Palette wood, thread,lemon rind, aluminum foil over papier-mâché. Painting of aNewborn Looking Deeplyon the Texture of Red Leaves orPotter’s Child inQuilt of Leaves. Daniel Schonning. Oil on pine board. Absent FatherReimagined as Three-Eyed Angel. DanielSchonning. Egg shells (chicken,tern, pintail duck), powdered aspirin,used matches, mechanical pencil on linoleum counter.Violence and ItsWet Edges or God of War, God of Love. Daniel Schonning.Xylograph onyew board. Fall Harvest in Childhood. Daniel Schonning.Zinc intaglio with nitricacid, lemon juice,bitumen,candle wax. Self-Portrait as Sudden SummerDownpour atEvening (as Viewed Through a Single-Paned Skylight, Inchesfrom the Artist’s Nose). Daniel Schonning.Gouache on paper.How to Mourn the Living. Daniel Schonning. Empty carton of Carlton cigarettes, nine forty-wattincandescent bulbs (clear glass), car battery, lemon seed, half-empty handle ofJack Daniel’s whiskey, ball-peen hammer.
The Living
After Kathryn Cowles’s “Clouds. Eleanor Eleanor. Acrylic on Canvas. 2005”
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Reprinted with permission from As When Waking by Daniel Schonning, published by the University of Chicago Press.
© 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
Susannah Lodge-Rigal
Daniel Schonning’s debut poetry collection, As When Waking (UChicago Press), was elected by editor Srikanth Reddy as part of the relaunched Phoenix Poets Series. Schonning’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets, POETRY Magazine, Poetry Daily, Orion Magazine, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Hobart and William Smith and serves as a Poetry Editor for Seneca Review.
The poems of Daniel Schonning’s debut collection range from personal examinations of childhood suffering and loss of faith to deep observations of images and objects to the foreclosure of a family home, a father estranged by addiction, mallards on a frozen pond, flowering bindweed, and a door to the underworld. With all its component pieces, As When Waking aims to apprentice itself to the medium of letters, inviting readers to listen and learn from the systems and symmetries of alphabets.
Schonning employs structural paradigms to explore themes of poetic lineage. Twenty-six of the poems in this collection are abecedarians, a form where the opening letter of each line advances through the alphabet, with the lines of the first poem proceeding alphabetically from A–Z, while those of the second poem move from B–A, and then C–B, all the way to Z–A. This structure is tied to Jewish mystic texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah, which probes the relationship between the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the world they inhabit.
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