Description
Beyond Where Words Can Go
A Novel in 200 Sonnets
Beyond Where Words Can Go traces a group of Tudor-era Benedictine monks before, during, and after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and England’s zigzag into Protestantism. What happens when a top-down authority dictates changes in a faith’s doctrines, rituals, and even the language in which it’s understood? How do you reconcile devotion to God with love for another man? Where’s home when the place you’ve lived for decades is destroyed not only as an institution but also as a physical structure? It takes creativity and profound fellow-feeling for these “odd and precious” men to chart a path forward.
Richard Smith’s first book, Not a Soul but Us, won the 2021 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and was released in 2022 by Bauhan Publishing. His next book, Beyond Where Words Can Go, will be published by Bauhan in Spring 2026, and an excerpt appears in the Spring 2025 issue of The Hudson Review. Both are narratives told in sonnets: Not a Soul but Us follows a 12-year-old boy orphaned and abandoned during the plague pandemic in mid-14th-century Yorkshire, and Beyond Where Words Can Gotracks a group of Tudor-era Benedictine monks before, during, and after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Richard is a psychologist with a clinical practice in Washington, D.C.
“Historical fiction at its best“
“As in his award-winning Not a Soul but Us, each page of Richard Smith’s new novel, Beyond Where Words Can Go, is a perfectly chiseled 14-line sonnet. In 200 sonnets (200 pages), every one of them free of contrivance, Smith’s narrator, a foundling raised in an abbey in southwest England, takes us on a journey from 1500 through the reign of five English monarchs and the turbulence of the Reformation. Through the lens of life in an abbey—the org chart, the rules, the food, the daily prayers, the music—Smith creates a world peopled by characters we come to cherish. Historical fiction at its best, surreptitiously a mystery, and so well written that it often refutes its title, Smith’s new novel is most importantly a love story that helps us see that holiness and physical desire are not at odds but can be made of the same stuff.”
—Ralph Alan Cohen, Founding Executive Director of the American Shakespeare Center and author of ShakesFear and How to Cure It.
“Both opera and symphony”
The word “sonnet,” from the Italian, “sonetto,” means a little sound or song. When there are two hundred sonnets in sequence such as those found in Richard Smith’s BeyondWhere Words Can Go, the result is both opera and symphony. Music indeed plays a large role in this bildungsroman of love and joy, of secrets, of brotherhood, of survival and faith, told in the voice of Simon, a 16th century monk living during the turbulent, violent time of Henry VIII and the English Reformation. Simon’s description of his beloved’s singing is as lush as an aria: “…If it had shape, your voice would make / a perfect sphere. If texture: soft, a hand / whose pressure reassures. If feeling: ache, / and wish. If color: blue, the deepening blue / when twilight’s almost over, blue that would / be black if black could shimmer.” Richard Smith proves himself to be maestro, master craftsman, and one of our best storytellers in this gorgeous novel-in-verse that at its core explores the power of love—platonic, familial, forbidden, Divine—especially when one’s home and world are under siege.
—Meg Kearney, author of Cardiac Thrill
“Vivid and indelible”
“Beyond Where Words Can Go is so many things at once: a collection of finely wrought narrative sonnets; a deeply felt (and highly unusual) love story spanning decades; a meticulously researched account of 16th-century English ecclesiastical history and practice—all in the space of 2800 lines! With psychological precision, subtle humor, and unfailing empathy, Smith brings to life not just a few central figures, but an entire monastery full of vivid and indelible characters. He has created an utterly original work of literature, as generous as it is sui generis.”
—Gary Krist, author of Trespassers at the Golden Gate and The Mirage Factory
“Brilliant and deeply moving”
“This intimate epic composed in sequential sonnets is the most brilliant and deeply moving story I’ve read in decades. That a classic poetic form raised to such heights by Shakespeare and Donne could shape a tale told with such fluidity is a miracle worthy of its monastic setting: all gold, no dross. Rich in history, both sacred and profane, it sparkles with wit, romance, spiritual insights, soaring imagery, and sudden erotic flashes–all in glowing lyrical passages through time and souls.”
—Charles Scribner III, author of Artists & Authors: A Life in Good Company
