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- Let’s Not Live on Earth
If an alien ship came to Earth, would you get on?
Sarah Blake follows up her previous book of poetry, Mr. West, with a stunning second collection about anxieties and injury. Blake uses self-consciousness as a tool for transformation, looking so closely at herself that she moves right through the looking glass and into the larger world. Fear becomes palpable through the classification of monsters and through violences made real. When the poems find themselves in the domestic realm, something is always under threat. The body is never safe, nor are the ghosts of the dead. But these poems are not about cowering. By detailing the dangers we face as humans, as Americans, and especially as women, these poems suggest we might find a way through them. The final section of the book is a feminist, science fiction epic poem, "The Starship," which explores the interplay of perception and experience as it follows the story of a woman who must constantly ask herself what she wants as her world shifts around her. Please note the hardcover is unjacketed.
Suicide Prevention
Retribution
The E-Ray Is a Gun
One Doctor Leads to the Next
Mothers
I Thought It Was a Good Idea to Walk to CVS with My Son on a Ninety-Degree Day
Everything Small
Two Oaks
Rats
For Max
A Threat
Mouths at the Party
The Safety of Women
You Are Connected to Everything
Watching TV, Seeing the Shot Woman
A Poem for My Son
Easier to Write the Poem Where I'm the Queen
In February 2015
My Obsession with Just Is My Obsession with the Temporal
The World
Dear Gun
How We Might Survive
Neutron Star
The Starship
SARAH BLAKE is the author of the poetry collection Mr. West, founder of the online writing tool Submittrs, and a recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and The Rumpus. She lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
"A series of highly attractive poems that dwell in the mundane and are edged with something sinister."
~Publishers Weekly starred review
"What Blake has accomplished here is quite extraordinary: a fusion of lyric and narrative laced with a heady blend of pop culture — monsters, zombies — and science fiction. And it all has bearing on the issues of the day, without ever preaching, just laying out the possibilities and, even more, the worrisome ambiguities."
~Frank Wilson, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Sarah Blake breaks her heart open for us in Let's Not Live on Earth by writing what being inside and outside the body is as simultaneity. I am jarred out of my own angle and what I've always known about bodies becomes uncanny."
~Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Milk and Filth
"Blake does an impressive job teasing out the complications...society."
~Brian Spears, The Rumpus
"error"
~Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Error"
~Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Milk and Filth
"""—"
"I was captivated by the intersection of motherhood, self, and humanity—including the monsters. Blake's style in this collection is narrative—a stance I admire because I think it's hard to do without drifting into prose. And 'Starship' is narrative at its epic best, its story line opening questions of desire, abandonment, choice."
~Joannie Strangeland, Saturday Poetry Pick
"A striking and complex book."
~Rob McLennan
"When Sarah Blake says Let's Not Live on Earth, it's not whimsy, it's vision. Her poems of suburban domesticity pushed to the breaking point give way to a genuinely fearsome feminist epic with the prescience of science fiction and the savagery of poetry."
~Kathleen Ossip, author of The Do-Over and The Cold War