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Upkeep
The poems in Sara London’s Upkeep offer a guidebook for both coping with and negotiating the difficult terrain of life after great personal loss. In the book’s opening section, the speaker explains to a Martian the ways we earthlings attempt to raise our dead—“you’ll find that with dreams // we exhume our dead without the mess /of upturned dirt”—and later finds comfort in objects that connect her to her late Mr. Fix-It father. These are elegies whose solemnity has been upended by humor and the nuanced interrogations of the daily rituals that heal us. “How do you / do it, start the experiment— / gas up, each day, anew?” she asks. Oatmeal and duct tape help, London suggests, but ultimately the heart The “old tubes, they play on.”
- GenresPoetry
108 pages, Paperback
Published September 3, 2019
About the author
Sara London
8 books1 followerSara London was born in San Francisco, and grew up in California and Vermont.
She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. London has worked as an editor in New York, and as a journalist on Cape Cod, and currently she teaches creative writing and literature at Mount Holyoke College. She has also taught at Amherst and Smith colleges. London is also administrative director of Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Her poems have appeared in such venues as The Iowa Review, Poetry East, The Hudson Review, and the Poetry Daily anthology. She is also the author of two children’s books
Sara resides in in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the USA, with her family.
She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. London has worked as an editor in New York, and as a journalist on Cape Cod, and currently she teaches creative writing and literature at Mount Holyoke College. She has also taught at Amherst and Smith colleges. London is also administrative director of Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Her poems have appeared in such venues as The Iowa Review, Poetry East, The Hudson Review, and the Poetry Daily anthology. She is also the author of two children’s books
Sara resides in in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the USA, with her family.
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
December 24, 2023
"What I can't get over / is your kind of patience, / which seems tonight a little like / love."
"In the chapter on human / grief, you'll find that with dreams / we exhume our dead without the mess / of upturned dirt."
"our stone of pocketed / sorrows could surely / sink weightless you."
"my father's / Mustang had ample horsepower, / and it ripped open the morning so loudly / the neighbors bled complaints. Which / made me love him more"
"Year later / he worried much older wheels of faith / and prayer, and wept often."
"Manners and sunshine get you nowhere."
"In a way, unless you are / dead, too, it is difficult / to understand"
"the heart aches-- / inheritance is its own infinite / argument"
"That it's not a dream, his drumming on the console-- / his song a little too loud, a little too / long, his passion greater than God ever calls for"
"(Funny how memory's hardware stays / greased to keep our ghosts from going.)"
"In the chapter on human / grief, you'll find that with dreams / we exhume our dead without the mess / of upturned dirt."
"our stone of pocketed / sorrows could surely / sink weightless you."
"my father's / Mustang had ample horsepower, / and it ripped open the morning so loudly / the neighbors bled complaints. Which / made me love him more"
"Year later / he worried much older wheels of faith / and prayer, and wept often."
"Manners and sunshine get you nowhere."
"In a way, unless you are / dead, too, it is difficult / to understand"
"the heart aches-- / inheritance is its own infinite / argument"
"That it's not a dream, his drumming on the console-- / his song a little too loud, a little too / long, his passion greater than God ever calls for"
"(Funny how memory's hardware stays / greased to keep our ghosts from going.)"
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review