On The Deletions (Editor’s Choice, coming 2025 from University of Akron Press):
Sarah Green is a luminous poet of wrenching separations, painfully attuned to the negative space visual artists speak of often: if the figure is gone, if the dream unanswered, what becomes of the ground on which such figures and forces lived? The brilliance of The Deletions is the spiritual and poetic cunning through which Green speaks toward stricken ground, allowing no single experience to govern the arc of this beautifully human book. Then what’s the story? The soul is the story, and the ground, and the field, and Sarah Green tends it all.
Katie Ford, author of If You Have to Go
How do we build beauty around absence; or, perhaps even more eerie, how do we scaffold presence around the act of disappearing? This poet uses masterful storytelling, personal revelation, and shapely, musical stanzas to unpack the lonely spaces of contemporary life. A straightforward litany of The Deletions’ themes—elegy, divorce, infertility, climate change—pales beside the realized ache of the individual moment, shot through with wry and exacting wit: “I think he thinks I’m sedated but I am just / awake saying hi to everyone like usual except / there’s iodine on my torso / there’s lidocaine in my feelings.” These poems gather a lifetime of loss into their arms, crush the reader into that messy embrace, and defiantly holler towards hope.
Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode
The book never blinks when I expect it to.
-Kiese Laymon, Heavy
“Welcome to the Neighborhood answers our urgent need for a contemporary examination of the complex connections between individuality and collectivity, between person and place. This book is exceptional and necessary.”
Erica Dawson, author of When Rap Spoke Straight to God
“She makes wisdom sound peculiarly exciting.”
—David Rivard
“We’re in the hands of a deft and sympathetic intelligence.”
—Rebecca Lindenberg
“I’m tremendously moved by the insight and appetite in this eloquent debut.”
—Gail Mazur
On Earth Science (more reviews here and here):
BUY/READ:
The Deletions (University of Akron) pre-order link coming in 2025 🙂
Earth Science (421 Atlanta, 2016) is out of print, but is available in these 43 libraries.
Welcome to the Neighborhood (Ohio University Press, 2019) can be ordered here: https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Welcome+to+the+Neighborhood