Sara Eddy is a poet from Amherst, Massachusetts. Her work can be found in journals such as Threepenny Review, Sky Island, Baltimore Review, SWWIM, and Raleigh Review. She has published two chapbooks of poetry, and her full-length collection, Ordinary Fissures, was recently released in May of 2024 from Kelsay Books.
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About Ordinary Fissures:
“Sara Eddy’s Ordinary Fissures is a splendid collection: dark, comic, loving, sad, disappointed, vulnerable, and—yes—confessional. These are poems both learned and filled with the language we speak, poems painfully, lyrically honest as one after the other they sing of the uncertainties attendant upon getting through each day. Her memories are haunting, and they can sting like those bees and nettles she often sings of. And, yet, how cathartic they are, treading into the dark woods, then bringing us back into a better understanding of who we are, and who we might be, if we only stopped to pay attention to the words she sings.” —Paul Mariani
“There’s a palpable urgency to these intimate, brazen, and heartfelt poems in which the speaker attends to life’s cracks and splits in their many forms. Someone presses her ear tight to a dormant hive, intently listening “for the hum of life;” someone peers into the swirling boiling water to see the “sweetness / and danger” where the jam jar has broken, determined “to scrub out the pot / and start over.” This is a book packed with gorgeous acts of close-looking, not just at our dark caverns and places where we feel broken, but also the natural world and animals—a heron, a sow, a queen bee, a crow—as a means of understanding how to “scurry and strive.” There’s such pleasure to be found in these pages that carry forth moments of both quiet grace and fierce rage, all the while insisting that no matter the storms and dark waters we might encounter, “What power we have… to tack or jibe/ grip time by the boom and face the wind / or give it our backs.””—Matt Donovan, author of The Dug-Up Gun Museum