Sarah Sarai’s Geographies of Soul and Taffeta takes place in a universe where the real and the unreal meet each other in a careful, ecstatic dance, where words melt into their partners and opposites, and Yin and Yang swirl together like the best kind of soft serve ice cream. The ideas and images here are exact, surprising, and often humorous: in fact, Sarai’s poems strike new ground in being intelligent and far reaching while maintaining an air of humility and matter of factness. —Christine Hamm
The poems in Sarah Sarai’s Geographies of Soul and Taffeta are little transgressions, butterflies a-wing. They present a poetry of surprise. Don’t expect candy (though there might be some); don’t expect demons (even the ones who live there). Dive in, world-hunter, dreamneeder. Let Sarai’s vision and images wing you to your next place, fiercely reflective and very much alive. —Richard Loranger
Sarah Sarai’s Geographies of Soul and Taffeta is a strong and beautiful sequence of poems. What haunts me most has to do with the emotional acuity and authority, how the poems’ subjectivities are rendered essential. The generosity, the word play and re-play, the variations, the real world and its perpetual redemptions, the imagination’s power not to transform exactly, but to reveal, which is transforming—all make Sarai’s new collection a rewarding and an astonishing read. —Debora Lidov
Sarah Sarai is the author of The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX[books], 2009). Her poems appear in journals including Barrow Street, Boston Review, The Collagist, Prelude, and others, as well as in the anthologies Composing Poetry, a Guide to Writing Poems and Thinking Lyrically (Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2016), edited by Gerry LaFemina; Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2013), edited by Nick McRae; Say It Loud: Poems About James Brown (Whirlwind Press, 2011), edited by Mary E. Weems and Michael Oatman; and The OR Panthology: Ocellus Reseau (Other Rooms Press, 2013). Ezstar Rizmar presented a paper on her poem, “Emily Dickinson Is Jewish” at the conference Witnessing Responses: A New Generation’s Perspectives on the Holocaust at Károli Gáspár University in Budapest. Her fiction appears in over twenty journals, including Cleaver, Devils Lake, and Fairy Tale Review. She is currently working her way through the novels of Shūsaku Endō and the oral histories of Svetlana Alexievich. When she was 23 years of age she was awarded a dozen donuts at Winchell’s. Sarah lives in Manhattan.
Reviews of Geographies of Soul and Taffeta
Mary Meriam in The Bind… “there is serious and searching and cosmic questioning…”
Spencer Dew in decomP magazinE… “the need to kill various elves”
July Westhale in Lambda… “irreverent, yet anguished”
Krystal Languell in Pleiades Book Review... “narrative clarity and a parallel grammatical flourish” (A review of both Geographies and Indolent Books. Print.)
Chris Mansel in The Daily Art Source… “a very personable, telling and humorous book…”
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