Geographies of Soul and Taffeta

Book excerpt: 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, dream-needer. 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 was born in Port Washington, grew up in California, and lives in New York. A former English teacher and college professor, she is now an editor and researcher. She has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Collections include The Future Is Happy, I Feel Good, Emily Dickinson's Coconut Face, O You of the Cotton Pajamas, and The Risen Barbie. Her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies.