The first English translation of the classic sixteenth-century Spanish love poem of the soul and its commentary by a spiritual seeker outside of the Church. When prayers go dry on the tongue, and any sense of God in the world is lost, it seems the spiritual seeker has nowhere to turn. This is the dark night of the soul that the great sixteenth-century saint John of the Cross experienced when he could no longer feel God"s presence and when prayer and spiritual practice no longer inspired him. The poem he wrote while in prison, on a scroll smuggled to him by one of his guards, has never been translated complete with his later commentary by anyone outside the Catholic church. Mirabai Starr brings this work to the twenty-first century in a brilliant and beautiful rendering.