We Have Been Lucky in the Midst of Misfortune (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

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"Sarah Stern’s poems combine praise and laments odes and elegies, and compress complex feelings into love poems to the reader. She harnesses the 'strange muscle-beast' of the tongue into songs that taste like edible blossoms of joy and loss––more joy than sorrow. 'Absence has its own color,' Stern tells us––demonstrates––in magical, inventive lines. These lyrics teach us about letting go without drama. Sometimes poetry does the work of therapy; sometimes, the work of painting and song. It’s all treasure, packed inside this volume, and now inside the reader’s imagination." —Marilyn Kallet, author of 18 books, including How Our Bodies Learned, poetry from Black Widow Press. "Few writers develop the clarity of spirit, much less the skill, to let people and things dear to them arrive and reveal themselves. Sarah Stern, in her best poems, is such a writer. Breathtaking. And many of the poems in this collection are her best." —Brooks Haxton, author of They Lift Their Wings to Cry, Fading Hearts on the River, and My Blue Piano. “With her crystalline poetics, surprisingly clear-cut and full-throated at the same time, Sarah Stern offers her readers the piercing force of sage, tender, and impassioned utterance. Her artfully understated voice rouses us to grasp what it is to be human and to live vehemently and wholeheartedly. 'Sometimes a sentence / Makes you love a stranger,' Stern insightfully writes in words that propel us to experience this poet’s formidable talents and compassion." —Yerra Sugarman is the author of two poetry collections, Forms of Gone and The Bag of Broken Glass. She is the recipient of numerous awards and holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston.