Kirjahaku

Poetry. Sara Nicholson's second collection, WHAT THE LYRIC IS, is a sharp, humorous, and poignant exploration of how the lyric in poetry both fits and fails us. Conversant with dead poets, but skeptical of their conceits, Nicholson mixes lightness with melancholy in poems with titles like Dante in Arkansas: My breath's been / Doomed to harmonize with fog. WHAT THE LYRIC IS turns the pastoral tradition upside down, ever careful to remind us of the price for all this reflection and merriment--Acorns are beautiful only to those / Who've never had to clean them up. Sara Nicholson's aim is 'true poems flee' says Emily Dickinson. You see what I did there, but, more importantly, if you read the poems herein you'll hear one of my favorite writers making extraordinary word-music. Hers is the lyric as unteachable moment. She sends and receives me.--Graham Foust I love the gravely funny, imaginative poems of WHAT THE LYRIC IS. Nicholson deploys a provisional dream-logic in which all things are level with 'the goddamn oak' or 'the bladder-shaped stars' and any itinerant hope that there is a wisdom greater than 'I wanted to sing / so I stopped talking' must be laid aside or get dragged instead to the trash. Freely admitting of what they do not know, these poems act as nonpology to the world that will not read them and frank lyric to all who are bold and fortunate enough to enjoy them.--Jae Choi

"Nicholson tarries with what remains of the ancient lineaments--discipline, devotion, works of corporal mercy--perhaps still seeking what Dante was after: the scraps that fall from the plates of the angels." --David Brazil, Colorado ReviewDeadpan, heartfelt and everything in between, Sara Nicholson poetry is a reluctant mystic who can both make us laugh and point us toward magical truths within a single poem. Her third collection of poems, April, is filled with the perverse and the sacred, whether the subject is art, love or sex, or whether it is ancient or contemporary. Nicholson's interests are timeless, and by the end of April, the reader may be convinced that they've brushed up against a somewhat strange and singular poet who is inventing a new way of seeing specifically for them.Sara Nicholson is the author of What the Lyric Is and The Living Method, both from The Song Cave. She lives in Boise, Idaho.