Iron, Ardent takes its title from an untitled poem by Emily Bronte in which she asserts: "That iron man was born like me /And he was once an ardent boy/ He must have felt in infancy /The glory of a summer sky." Like Bronte's poem, this collection is concerned with tracing the world as a "Vale of Soul-Making," in which we are formed and transfigured by the facticity of living, the being of the body, or as Black writes "the grief of the good body/which remembers everything." In poems that track experience of disability, love, sex, disillusion, and motherhood, Black maps both the sorrow and glory of forming a soul in a world where "whatever will not shrivel must grow."