“Compelling, clear-eyed, brave, and wise, Sophia Falco’s poems move us and teach us how to go forward: “Stuck in a windowless building / writing with a fucked up pen and red eyes. / I was leaking potential through my pores.” Falco’s voice is honest and relentless: “I need to know, can astronauts / cry in space? If so, what would / happen to their tears? / On earth do trees cry? / The unidentified tree didn’t respond back to my hit. / Yet the metal locker did. / Well, man-made echoes of destruction.” Running Past The Red is brilliant—a testament to becoming and struggle, to the breathtaking strength of poetry and learning and soul-making. This is a necessary book.”
—Joseph Lease, author of Fire Season
“Sophia Falco uses the pyrotechnic precision of poetry to illuminate her own journey through a shadowy psychiatric system. “I’m doing this for poetry” she stated in a note scrawled amongst countless journal pages from deep inside the ward. Because only the power of poetry to witness and transform could grant her the strength to survive and thrive beyond those walls. And to condense the best of those in-the-moment observations into the crystalline facets of these short, sharp, clairvoyant poems. Like snapshots of a hidden world smuggled out to us in secret, her images are often shocking, always ironic, deeply painful, and consistently courageous to the core. The result is a detailed map of an epic journey toward healing.”
—Scott Lankford, author of the national-award-winning book: Tahoe Beneath the Surface
“Running Past The Red offers a raw, intimate account of bipolar episodes. Moving through forms and abrupt shifts, the poems trace a mind in motion. Poetry becomes a lifeline, an act of making sense of fracture and keeping hold of the self as it begins to slip.”
—La Piccioletta Barca (Literary Journal)
