The Dark Night of the Soul

Inspired by St. John of the Cross’s sixteenth-century vision of divine desolation, The Dark Night of the Soul reimagines that passage through loss and transformation through the lens of the modern age. Across twenty-one poems, Hannah Kreinbrink traces the contours of heartbreak, silence, and endurance—where love collapses, identity dissolves, and the self must learn to see again in the absence of light. Drawing on myth, music, and the architecture of the sacred, these poems are both cerebral and luminous, rendering the agony of becoming as a form of devotion.