With the prisms of varied vocabularies refracting detail and language, Sarah Lang illuminates the intricacies of communication, of the moments and gaps between action and reaction, and, as she does, announces herself as a commanding and rhythmically captivating new poetic presence.

The first section of this extended meditation borrows from The Farmer’s Almanac, while the second is infused with the language of the occult. Inthe third part, Lang invokes the vocabulary of the institution – the airport, the hospital. In the end, these linguistic pillagings accrete into a poignant shadow under the letters of Lang’s own words, pulling them into a stark and alluring focus. With echoes of Virginia Woolf, Lang has given us a constellation of poems as delicate and relentless as pure light.

‘With ferocity and tenderness, direction and indirection, with and without hope these staggering poems astonish at every turn. One gets up from them changed.’

– Carole Maso

Sarah Lang was born on a Saturday the winter of 1980, in Northwestern Canada. In the spring of 2004, she completed her MFA at Brown University. She began work on her PhD in Chicago in the fall of 2005. Her work, which includes poetry, prose, personal, critical and medical esssays, has been published in Canada, Great Britian, and the United States. She has translated work from Latin, Ancient Greek, French, Ukrainian, Japanese, and Mandarin. This is her first book. She now lives in, and writes of, airports. She intends to orbit the earth before her projected death in 2056.

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