BRIGHT-EYED: The new poetry collection from Sarah Sarai & Poets Wear Prada

BRIGHT-EYED is now available on Amazon. 

from the back cover: 

Bright-Eyed, Sarah Sarai’s deliciously quirky excursion into her California roots, explores the concept of family and the racial and gender divides that can obscure the basic truths of existence. Danced out into the sun-bleached So Cal heat, these poems dazzle. As the poet says in “Wasted in a Special Way,” It is always good to be young and loaded./Something, somewhere is always good./Something somewhere is always wasted. These poems are terrific. Nothing wasted. Nothing at all. 

 —Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of EROTIC: New & Selected

With Sarah Sarai’s Bright-Eyed, I’m reminded of the Miles Davis idea that music’s not the notes but the attitude of s/he who blows the notes, and Bright Eyes is filled with attitude. It’s a joy-ride through the old neighborhood informed by a vital wit that ranges from Sun Ra to Nietzsche and drops aphorisms the way Hansel and Gretel dropped crumbs – the past doesn’t haunt you/you haunt the past; youth is a superpower; To have a self:/That’s an art; and on and on – reminding us, if we need reminding, that you can’t go home again, but you do anyway.

—Tim Tomlinson, author of This Is Not Happening to You; co-founder, New York Writers’ Workshop

Order here: https://amzn.to/3PM90bH 

BRIGHT-EYED is published by Poets Wear Prada, a press founded in Hoboken and specializing in beautiful paperback books. Roxanne Hoffman is founder and editor-in-chief. Jack Cooper is editor.

About BRIGHT-EYED: These poems reflect this native New Yorker’s family's move to California; growing up on the West Coast—the San Fernando Valley, the Crenshaw District, Echo Park, in the 1960s and 19670s as a preteen, teen, and soon an adult; and her responses to her new surroundings and the times. Several poems explore interracial tension and coexistence from the viewpoint of a young person whose older sister created an interracial family. The poet explores her relationships with her nephew, niece, their children, and her brother-in-law from the perspectives of both family and race. Her insight and wit are reminiscent of the California poet Diane Wakowski and James Broughton.

 

Pine Hills Review LOW-LIFE MALIBU (a #poem)

Adventurous lit journal Pine Hills Review is published at The College of St Rose in Albany, New York. 

Pine Hills Review, "Low Life, Malibu" by Sarah Sarai. 

Dig it. And also, the perfect image.“Lunch Break” by Nicole Monroe. That's what life felt like when I was young and shiftless. 

Check out the PHR submission policies for art and poetry and prose. 

The end. (Sorry to be so brief.)

Their Every Yellow Leaf #poem #NewOhioReview

Aspen leaves still green but ever fluttery.

https://budburst.org/plants/38

Their Every Yellow Leaf

 

Jacinth looks at the pig and 

asks what she did in another lifetime

to be so beautiful. 

Maybe not everyone would see it

but she’s perfect.

I am not everyone. I agree. 

Alice is perfect, 

a hippopotamus made compact. 

I stroke her dark hide and feed her 

fruit cup from breakfast. 

Cauliflower and a toasted bagel. 

Plum jam. 

With the pig, Jacinth 

and I break bread. 

Jacob, who is new to this poem,

buries his cigarette in a late Fall lawn 

to take a call from Quebec. 

In bright sunlight Alice considers

eternally recycling life. Is my guess. 

Jacinth has no interest in me or Jacob 

and praises only the pig, who is complete. 

Is her guess. The heart gets lonely 

some days. Is Jacob’s guess. 

Feeding Alice renders longing and irritation 

irrelevant, without obliterating either. 

Aspens snap their every yellow leaf. 

The trees expected we’d be gone by now. 

Their every yellow leaves don’t guess. 

 

Thank you to the editors of New Ohio Review, 2023 for selecting this poem.

Renegade Sonnets Once Removed

"September" by Gerhard Richter
Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.C.

Renegade Sonnets Rendered via Ekphrasis

A few notes on Rob Stanton’s Once Removed (Nono Press/2022)

 

by Sarah Sarai

 
We look to the past to understand the past. Also repetitive disorders and daily stupidities. We look to the past to understand a shared present, greed and hauteur acted out, to divine a future we pretend we can’t foresee. Or we try to persuade our leaders in a pursuit of common sense, kindness, equality. One much-studied and globally shared event of the past, the attack on the Twin Towers, is interrogated by Rob Stanton in his ekphrastic chapbook Once Removed. 
 
The object of Stanton’s contemplation is, of course, not the attack but the remarkable painting September by Gerhard Richter, whose work often magnetizes viewers. I’ve watched museum patrons squint and study his canvases in a manner that feels unique from interrogations of other artwork. Strictly anecdotal, on my part. 
 
Nudged by an anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers and through a study of Richter’s 2005 painting, Stanton created these stencil sonnets. My term. They are a cry from a heftier sonnet of classical literary history and the many contemporary iterations. They are stripped. As in September. Neither better nor worse than earlier iterations of a loved form of poetry, each wee sonnet is comprised of four stanzas: two brief, each four lines, all short; then two stanzas, three lines each. Each a puff of word or each word is a puff of smoke. Appropriate by design as September depicts the Towers after the second building was hit. Matching what we witnessed on that day, in Richter’s work the structures are discernable only through menace of dust and aggregation. From Rob Stanton’s Sonnet 154:
 
A corona of suddenly
insignificant 
 
                        litter spills
                        Blow back.
                        blow back 
 
On the twentieth anniversary of the attack I broke down and watched the documentaries. That’s what there was, “litter spill.” For the record, Richter was flying to New York in a commercial plane that had to be diverted to Halifax. But that fact makes him no more privy to this wound that will not heal than anyone else. 
 
From “160.” “...already / pockets of flouted sky / cerulean blue / are being tendered.” 
 
Once Removed is a Nono Press venture, as is Sonnets 1-159, in a longer work “dedicated to the work of Luc Tuymans.” 
 
 
 
A native of the UK, Rob Stanton teaches in Austin, Texas. He is the author of The Method (Penned in the Margins, 2011) and Trip- (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2013). Contact him for more information.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Blackbird v Blackbird: Stevens v Sarai: Two Poems

"The End of November: The Birds That Didn't Learn How to Fly" by Thornton Dial, 2007. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.

I am close to embarrassed, but what would be the point. I already know that I am not Wallace Stevens, and he is not Sarah Sarai. That being established may I say I had Stevens’ poem in mind as I wrote “Another Way of Looking.” I was responding to Stevens. Saying, Click a prism and you will see different perspectives with each time. But now that I see my poem adjacent to the great Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Thirteen Ways...” Well. Yikes and all that. Sigh. I plow on. First my poem. Then his. Thanks to the editor of Prelude, Stu Watson.

Another Way of Looking
by Sarah Sarai

The poem on the page
remains on the page

the page with the poem is
the page with the poem it

may lift it self (up)

or snack and nap

but there it is on the page

in all its theory

in all its wisdom which

is not all wisdom

hey, a blackbird knows wisdom

just one blackbird

no need to cast shade over

the whole of them

from Prelude Journal, Stu Watson, ed.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,   
The only moving thing   
Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II
I was of three minds,   
Like a tree   
In which there are three blackbirds.   

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   
It was a small part of the pantomime.   

IV
A man and a woman   
Are one.   
A man and a woman and a blackbird   
Are one.   

V
I do not know which to prefer,   
The beauty of inflections   
Or the beauty of innuendoes,   
The blackbird whistling   
Or just after.   

VI
Icicles filled the long window   
With barbaric glass.   
The shadow of the blackbird   
Crossed it, to and fro.   
The mood   
Traced in the shadow   
An indecipherable cause.   

VII
O thin men of Haddam,   
Why do you imagine golden birds?   
Do you not see how the blackbird   
Walks around the feet   
Of the women about you?  

VIII
I know noble accents   
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   
But I know, too,   
That the blackbird is involved   
In what I know.   

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,   
It marked the edge   
Of one of many circles.   

X
At the sight of blackbirds   
Flying in a green light,   
Even the bawds of euphony   
Would cry out sharply.   

XI
He rode over Connecticut   
In a glass coach.   
Once, a fear pierced him,   
In that he mistook   
The shadow of his equipage   
For blackbirds.   

XII
The river is moving.   
The blackbird must be flying.   

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.   
It was snowing   
And it was going to snow.   
The blackbird sat   
In the cedar-limbs.

from the Poetry Foundation website.

If Ezekiel could see it, why not me

(A Chinese dwarf, courtesy of the Met; my alter ego) As a follow-up to my August 4 posting, I’ve done it, revisited my not-yet-published fiction. Deleted: several paragraphs on what a dumb schmuck I am. Yesterday I submitted one of the revived stories to a contest and charged the fee. Thank you, Chase. On the 21st of I sent off another of these revived stories. Not for a contest but there’s money if they take it. Two stories now out there, waiting. Last month I pulled together a novella I’d started again years ago. Found a reader who has a great eye. So now it’s ready to go asking for what it's worth. It's a delight. Two stories and a novella. Then a novel is collecting dust, all the dust there is in my Cloud. The one solid piece of advice I was given in grad school was: Leave New York. I don't belong here. I never have. I wonder if I'd feel better about my work if I'd moved. I'll be back to this blog in September. Ezekiel? Read the skies. Was he in pain?

Ahab's tale never gets old. Changes by way of perspective.

 

Ahab's white whale, courtesy of the NYTimes.

The Avoirdupois Chic

More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile. – Melville

My depraved indifference to death
sets Ahab to thumping his peg
against my leg so we’ll perchance into
that which precedes an heir bearing
his bi-syllabic surname on banners bright
through the belly of the whale warm as
mutton and potatoes tea towel-topped.
If you can’t bear a son, at least a splinter
Mr. Ahab says, for use against blubbery
blowhard though how, you might puzzle.
No intimate to his intricacies am I
who harbor soft-spots for heavyweights
fat as concubines, the avoirdupois chic.
Given the length of a life in nautical miles
there’s hardly time for history to congeal
for the slain to raise kin underskin the
abandoned to banshee dreams as locust
swoop hover and hum desert-side
Ahab Uno’s tent on palmy summer eves.
Ecstasy is all it’s cracked up to be,
insufficient, a means to a cul-de-sac.
Are locust merely in love with love?
Starting soon, let’s no longer be afraid.
The locust are at the door, dear. 
Well, set a plate for the happy couples! 
Tomorrow Ahab goes with his gut,
with its celiac flora.  Sing a seafaring
song of fish fingers, ladies, avast! ahoy!
Childhood fosters the eternal orphan.
God wants what God wants.
You, my dear Ahab, merely want,
though That Can Change, a sea battle
dispatch, a motto conceived of
circumstance and truth, life’s sequels,
now ebooks or available for download
at a workstation near me.  Near you.

by Sarah Sarai. first published in Berfrois in 2011.

Berfrois (https://www.berfrois.com) remains a remarkable amalgam of idea, narrative, poetry, perspective, philosophy, natural history, science, art, architecture, you-name-it-ism. 

In the year of covid-fear all the hairs on my head turned shock-white ... #poem

 

https://wallpapercave.com/w/uwp2109286

Is March 1 a special day? Do we prank each other? In Arts class do we begin construction of a 15-day calendar to note the advent of the Ides of March. Any day, every day, anyone can be betrayed, being the theme?

The antidote to betrayal is to keep your expectations low. Don't convince yourself that today is the day your lottery ticket rings a bell. Don't assume that today, today, your luck is amping up and you will meet a gorgeous kind generous fertile not-fertile mate of any persuasion. The earth keeps moving. Most often, when you smile at someone they will not report you to the police. Somewhere, some child is happy. 

I'm ignoring the ruthless man in Russia.

Back to me. I showed up here to wish everyone a day of hope. Yeah, hope can be a killer of tender dreams, but we need it. This weirdo, me, is less tuned into hope, a future fantasy - not to be turned away but the now. The now. Whatever they're doing the clouds are astounding in their visual brilliance. Clear skies. Atmospheric struggles between pollution and clean air aside, there are pigeons. Always there are pigeons, plump and strutting, at least here in N.Y.C. If pigeons have earned an attitude of superiority and desire to parade their chubby selves, so can I. (I don't know why that's true. Let's pretend it is.)

I had a poem published in February, one I shall herein, here and now, share with you. It's about a painful swath of my life. About hope and persistence. Pulling away from pain. Moving on. One friend called it a "hair poem." Okay. Not really. Whatever you want.

"iv.

In the year of covid-fear all the hairs on my head turned shock-white, all white, only white."

Read "Shock-White" on the gorgeous and historical site, Big City Lit. I love the editors - Alyssa Yankwitt, Christopher Cappeluti, Barry Wallenstein, Richard Levine - who took over from Nick (Nicholas Johnson), who I loved also. Everyone loved. 

Everyone loves. Yes, we can all love. Don't have to admit it. Just enjoy. We're all forgiven every day.

A Friend of Mine Has Disappeared #poem (she was at a #retreat / I nailed it)

spiral or tendril?

A Friend of Mine Has Disappeared

To a spiritual retreat,

I am thinking,

the sort wherein

orchestral rustling

of leaves accompany

spiritual exercise.

Wherein spirals and tendrils,

the inner ear's carpet,

unfurl as royal messengers

bear baskets overflowing

sweetmeats and jewels

and, remember, I know 

her, mystique.

A truck's bullhorn blast

on Third Avenue, 2 a.m.

That's mystique, too.

I suspect she is at a writers'

retreat and didn't say.

She knew I'd be jealous.

Oh, Universe, embrace me

as I weep my petty tears.

Wherever she is, allow

my friend settle into 

knowing as You allow

my wretched unknowing.

Thanks to Pure Slush for including this poem in their anthology on friendship. There's a story here, much of which is set in my imagination. I hadn't heard anything from my friend A., who lived nearby. She wasn't at a spiritual retreat, it turns out, but she was at an artist colony and also in the midst of 'issues'. So, this and that, a call-for-work from the Australian press Pure Slush . . .

After and Sometimes . a poem from Stonewalls' Legacy Anthology

art: Ashley deLeon Nicole*

After and Sometimes

Relive those parties where every bottle was uncorked and

passed around and everyone smoked everything, double-

checked each auto’s glove box for at least a Sherman or 

a roach. And you left with exactly the wrong woman who 

was exactly the right one, if only for less than twelve hours. 

And not everyone was anything, not white, employed,

focused. And all had self-righteous halos of wild hair 

imperfect as a precisely imprecise stitch in a Persian rug.

You had fun. We all did. It had become more possible.

Sarah Sarai. Stonewalls Legacy: A Poetry Anthology. Hidden Gems Press., Ed. Rusty Rose & Marc Rosen. 2019.

*Ashley DeLeon Nicole https://www.thespruce.com/free-birthday-party-games-1356524

WE KNEW HOW #poem We waited for our laptops to recognize our sovereignty. Were comforted by a lavender mist ... #decomp #SarahSarai

"We Knew How" was published in decomP magazinE, August 2015.
And in Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books).

Relive those parties where every bottle was uncorked... "After and Sometimes" #poem

After and Sometimes

Relive those parties where every bottle was uncorked and

passed around and everyone smoked everything, double-

checked each auto’s glove box for at least a Sherman or 

a roach. And you left with exactly the wrong woman who 

was exactly the right one, if only for less than twelve hours. 

And not everyone was anything, not white, employed,

focused. And all had self-righteous halos of wild hair 

imperfect as a precisely imprecise stitch in a Persian rug.

You had fun. We all did. It had become more possible.

Sarah Sarai. Stonewalls' Legacy: A Poetry Anthology. Hidden Gems Press., Ed. Rusty Rose & Marc Rosen. 2019.

photo. Sarah Sarai. Madison Square Park.

“Darwinian Arguments for the Quick Grab" #poem

On the Shelving Cart

“Pictorial Archive of Female Touch”

“Freud’s How-To: Volume IX 

            of the Academy of Futile Investigations”

“Library of Geological Curiosity:  Female Orgasm 

            Challenges to the Richter Scale”

“Proceedings of the Society for Sensual Revelation”

“Darwinian Arguments for the Quick Grab”

“Theoretical Orgasm: A Position Paper”

“Real Deal Orgasm: Authentications”

“Paradigms of Necessary Ecstasy”

“Tendencies to Colonize the Cunt”

“No Longer that Rare Rapture: 

            An Expository Essay”

“Inner Thigh Love in the Early Middle Ages”

“Your Porous Skin So Hungry”

“Mechanical Schemata for Quickies”

“Rounded Hip on Rounded Hip: 

            A Cartographer’s Dream” 

“Universal Primer on Teaching Touch”

 “Finger-probing Vaginal Regions and 

            Other Investigatory Bliss”

 “Stately Pleasure Domes”

“Love’s Globalization: Sacred Texts on 

            Orgasm as Universal Verity”

“Venture Capitalism: Artifact of 

            Nothing in Contrast to Women Sighing”

“American Medical Association’s

            Acknowledgement of the Embodied 

            Ache for Pleasure”

“The Atlas of Female and Non-binary 

            Explorations in a New World”

“American Medical Association

            Addendum:  Immeasurable 

            Possibilities of Gratification”

“I Married a Vagina: An Inside Story” 

“Big: America Awakens”

“Expansionists Praise Ample Regions of Flesh”

“Vag on Vag: We Happy”

 ___

Sarah Sarai. Sinister Wisdom: The Lesbian Body Issue, Fall 2017

if you suffer sensitivity to shellfish, fishy smells, fish scales . . .

Bajo Manhattan Block Set, Maisonette.com

Do Not Take This Medication . . .

If you are prone to choking, choke when prone, 

smell gas, pass gas, are gas lit in the gaslight 

of a dark night; suffer sensitivity to shellfish, 

fishy smells, fish scales, practicing scales, 

scaling a climb-wall, toy towns built to scale, 

that youth who can’t come out of their shell, 

oh, that’s you; if you are allergic to all-beef patties, 

Peppermint Patty, Patty Hearst, an Irishman 

named Paddy, Patty Duke, the Patty Duke of Earl, 

duking it out with some schmuck. Do not take 

This Medication if allergic to flu shots, recently flew, 

fear wearable software with a virus. Do no use 

software at the dinner table. Only flatware.

—Sarah Sarai, First Literary Review East, Nov. 2019

'The Great Mute Who Is Almighty' & 'The Shiny You Have Missed' - 2 prose poems now in Unbroken

from The Met Museum collection

'The Great Mute Who Is Almighty' & 'The Shiny You Have Missed' - two prose poems - are on Unbroken. 

Thanks to editors Dale Wisely, Howie Good, and Laura Gregory for selecting these two and for a sophisticated presentation.

I wrote about Julian Bond's chance encounter which enabled the first all Black delegation from Georgia to participate in the Democratic Convention on this blog. Here. (Re: The Great Mute Who Is Almighty). Read both poems.

"This Poem and Joan Crawford" #poem by Sarah Sarai in @ghostcitypress

“This Poem and Joan Crawford”is in Ghost City Review.
 You gotta read it to believe it. Thank you.

& watch for my new collection, That Strapless Bra in Heaven. December 1 from Kelsay Books.

Jaws - The Exorcist: #poem

You're gonna need a bigger boat.

Family

My three siblings are older than I am.

The biggest Russian doll who

contains we younger is Jean,

and it is with her I saw the movie Jaws.

For The Exorcist I just went along with

a loose assemblage, friends of friends.

That’s what you do with movies,

you see them, even if it’s the first

day and you are blithe as a donut on

an oblong tray at Winchell’s.

If the Vatican set up a table in

the theater lobby like Seventh Day

Adventists in the subways I’d have

signed up for a catechism class on

the spot. That was some scary shit.

One time Jean sent me a clipping from

the San Francisco Examiner.

Two sisters, 76 and 82ish, lived together

on Nob Hill until the older murdered

the younger. Watch your back, kid,

Jean printed in the margin.

I knew Jaws was going to be epic,

am unsurprised by this future of

plastic predators-of-the-seas rising from

bubble baths on Saturday Night Live.

But when the shark leapt from an

endless ocean of lost whalers, Jean

and me, we screamed, we shrieked,

we grabbed each other’s hands.

Before and after Jaws I have known terror.

That was the only time I ever held my sister’s hand.

___

Sarah Sarai. Published in Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books), 2016.

My #poem in #Quiddity IN TRAGEDY LET THERE BE THE ECONOMY #SarahSarai #Leviticus @farstargirl

Marc Chagall
 Jeremiah's Lamentations
Original Lithograph, 1956

I continue to be astonished to have found a remarkably contemporary quotation in Lamentations, of all books. I was prepared for wisdom but not for such specific-to-my-times wisdom.

We have drunk our water for money; 
our wood cometh to us for a price.

Jewish Publication Society tr., Tanakh, 1917. 

When I chanced on the contemporary in the ancient and sprang into a poem. And my poem, “In Tragedy Let There Be the Economy,” sprang into Issue 12.1 of Quiddity, which may no longer be in print (as of 1.6.22).

Translations of that verse vary. The above is from the 

Think: Vitamin Water. Think Nestle and their lethal baby formula. Think: Monetizing the planet. Think: We never learn.

My sneak-in poems in Gone Lawn: 32 #poetry

Click H e R e to read "My Father Sleeps Rough in His Sleep" and "Complexities Run Interference" I didn't realize until this post that both poems involving sneaking into - a golf course in the San Fernando Valley and a church in New York City.

My poem "Souls in the Penalty of Flesh" is in the handmade zine, Ethel

Ethel is a hand-made, home-stitched, mindfully assembled, superbly curated journal. Or-zine and-zine all-zine.  The work of Sara Lefsyk and Joanna Penn Cooper.  Click on "Ethel" for more. My poem starts a little like this (click on title for more): . . .

Souls in the Penalty of Flesh

The concept of air humming its tune:

girlhood, Bach crooning, un- and happiness,

a consciousness which materialized into her,

the result of an agreement to fuck on Thursdays,

.  .  .

Volume 3 - January 2019

Submit to Ethel Zine: Send up to five pieces of writing and/or art to ethelzinesubmit@gmail.com with Zine Submission in the Subject line. Or from 10-28 pages of writing and/or art with Chapbook Submission in the subject line.  OR Submit a Mini-Book:  Send up to 15 miniature pages of miniature writing/art with Mini-Book Submission in the subject line.