“Earth, the dense element of our residence, our realities, raised, heightened, transformed––by language alone––into its spacious complement: air”––with this succinct remark Gustaf Sobin suggests his intentions in his newest collection. Word chases word in the poet’s search for the transcendent. In lyric transformation, the poems in The Earth as Air arise out of the particular, the graphic, the intensely perceived, turning experience into the weightless particles of a new, intellective music.