Bright-Eyed (Poets Wear Prada) 2024: Reviews keep happening

Poets, friends, the curious, the adventurous. . . Each reviewer of Bright-Eyed (Poets Wear Prada/2024) offers a fresh perspective on my poems ... which journey from the East Coast to the West Coast (Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, the Crenshaw District, Echo Park, Malibu, up to San Francisco and Seattle). These poems explore that famously tricky topic of family, as well as race, friendship, a sense of place. All are beautiful. Feel free to comment here or on Amazon.

The reviews. . .

Rain Taxi. REVIEW by Jim Feast: The link is to an Instagram post.

The Writing Disorder. REVIEW by Ed Go

MER/Mom Egg Review. REVIEW by Jordan E. Franklin. 

Compulsive Reader. REVIEW by Charles Rammelkamp

Tears in the Fence. REVIEW by John Brantingham

Necromancy Never Pays. REVIEW by Jeanne Griggs & from Michael T. Young: "It is a deft collection that brings us along seamlessly in learning the art of having a self and should find a place on any poetry-lover’s shelf."

Thanks to Roxanne Hoffman and Jack Cooper of

 Poets Wear Prada (Hoboken, New Jersey and Paris, France).

Various incarnations of Sarah Sarai. Stay tuned. We update monthly, or hope to:

Sarah Sarai, 2024:

Sarah Sarai, 2010, or so.  

Sarah Sarai, 2023, with Stacy's Daughter, in L.A.

PurCHasE from the seller of your choice, including: Amazon  Bookshop 

Also by Sarah Sarai:

The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX/2009)

Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books/2016)

That Strapless Bra in Heaven (Kelsay Books/2019)

Oracular Radiation and The Young Orator

2 poems:

Marc Jacobs designs clothes or his team does or whatever. And accessories. And many new stores which are polluting Greenwich Village. So that's the background to "(Marc Jacobs to the West Village.)" And, yeah, I did feel an elephant trunk brush my calves, but that was as I crossed Third Avenue, near 26th Street. See, "As She Crosses." Both poems are in Other Rooms Press' latest issue, Oracular Radiation. That is such a great name I'm not sure poems are necessary. Oracular Radiation conjures old movies and visions of what could be.

Co-editors of Other Rooms are Ed Go and Michael Whalen. Ed Go is a poet and artist - I've oogled with much respect his collaborations several times at the Center for the Book in New York City. He wrote "Heaven, Hell & Middle Earth," an essay about three poems in my collection, The Future Is Happy.

1 story:

Last year my story "The Young Orator" was published as a fiction chapbook by Winged City. The publisher and editor, Teneice Marie, has revamped so Winged City is now under Argus House Press. "The Young Orator," about an eight-year old who spouts quotations from Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The story also features a '57 Chevy Bel Air with pinstriping.  

I Rethink Heaven: Roethke's "Heard in a Violent Ward"

In his essay "Heaven, Hell & Middle Earth" (on three of my poems),  Ed Go questions my choices in "Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary in Heaven." I have, essentially, created a Mad Hatter's Tea Party in the next realm.

Go makes a good point.  Do I really want to spend an awfully long time with these malcontents: Humbert Humbert, Nora (from A Doll's House), Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Medea, Jane Eyre. Even Holden Caufield. Holden Caufield?

With the exception of Jane Eyre, sensible and passionate and having, I assume, a keen interest in social issues, what was I thinking? Even my father, a prince among malcontents, was uncomfortable with Holden. (I made him read Catcher in the Rye.)

"He's always squeezing his pimples," my father said. We are a squeamish family.

Ed Go wants to hang out with Mina Harker, whose husband Jonathan introduced her to Count Dracula. That went well. Also Deety Carter from a Heinlein novel, Precious Jones, Lois Lane and Janey Smith, who I don't know. Go has a point. These characters are more in the Jane Eyre-vein, accomplished women who've overcome enough to offer sharp perspective and some laughs.

I wrote the poem over fifteen years ago when I imagined each character would now have (now, in the afterlife) a new vision. Or maybe I was starved for conversation. There were a lot of people in my life back then, but . . .

My Heaven was an endstop in amber and I anticipated entertainment? I'm not renegging, and, yes, it's parlor game-ish to decide who'll I want around me. Reading Theodore Roethke's "Heard in a Violent Ward" got me thinking about all this. Eternity with the poets. Hmmmm.


Heard in a Violent Ward

In heaven, too,
You'd be institutionalized.
But that's all right,—
If they let you eat and swear
With the likes of Blake,
And Christopher Smart,
And that sweet man, John Clare.

___________
Theodore Roethke, The Far Field, 1964

"Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina in Heaven" is in The Future Is Happy. Click to get to Amazon.

While the soup heats: Ed Go, the G train, essay on my poems

Go's pocket. O Smêagol!

Soup? French lentils pink, and thin as orphan about to eat.  They cook down quickly. I saute garlic; spices; add vegetables.  Cauliflower disintegrates into a million microscopic "ettes" so the soup seems creamy.

Chard, kale, beet greens. Carrots and their tops or carrot tops and their bottoms. Sweet potatoes. Add a sliced apple to offset the pleasant bitterness of greens.  So that's what's reheating on the stove. 

As for Ed Go, co-editor of Other Rooms Press, well, he introduced me to the "G" train a few years ago so I could get to an Other Rooms reading.  His instructions on problems inherent in the "G" (many) included cell phone #s, escape routes, promises to catch up with me in the hereafter if I didn't make it. I made it.

Since then my ease with the G has stunned citizens of Queens and Brooklyn and saved me last night when an F train from Manhattan turned into an M. I made it.

Ed Go wrote an essay, "Heaven, Hell & Middle Earth," about three poems in The Future Is Happy: "Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina in Heaven" "The Rebirth Live" and "hAve You Been Married, the Sister asK" (the latter published in Other Rooms).

A poet himself, Go schools the reader on new ways into a poem along routes of transformation, transcendence, sufferings, company. For example:

'. . . for music is that perfect blend of form and substance, and in “The Rebirth Live” it comes in the form of a “compact miracle disk” (27) that reminds the I of the poem of birth, and rebirth, not an interpretation but an experience—a miraculous one that transcends interpretation.'

Take a look at Heaven, Hell & Middle Earth.