Poetry. The poems in Sara Nicholson's THE LIVING METHOD imaginatively grasp the raw materials of nature, calling the reader to the "outer limits of the dark," where one notices the music of the woods and gardens while searching for "the youngest photo of the night." These poems explore and create various orders of images, a mysterious taxonomy of words and scraps of phrases that revive what in lesser hands would remain dying metaphors. Here, in her debut collection, a new and singular poetic logic reveals itself, growing tenderly out of the "droning chamber" of the poet's throat, through Google image searches, and from the rich soil of archaic landscapes. "Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky claimed, 'Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.' Sara Nicholson makes poems with her hippocampus, that somewhat mysterious part of the brain that deals with memory and spatial recognition in ways we have yet to understand conclusively. Her poems speak to us directly from somewhere in there: 'A queen will dwell in the radius and eat it//but the circumference/will answer without a refrain.' We can hear a voice at once speaking to us while also thinking aloud to itself. These are poems of inquiry without the presumptuous rhetoric, wonder without the rhapsodic glitz, formal control without the self-congratulatory show tune medley. I've read very few poets of my generation who have so decidedly shrugged off pretense and posturing. She's pure hippocampus, navigating the external world from deep within the internal. We hear a voice speaking to us, but that voice comes from a crowded place, amid a thousand thoughts we do not hear. Her poems have no angle. They touch on the occult and hermetic but do not wear them as a shroud. They reach out from the radius into the radiant."—Matthew Henriksen

The Living Method

Literature & Fiction

Nicholson, Sara

Poetry

The Song Cave

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

What the Lyric Is

A Third Collection of Poems from the Visionary Imagination of Sara Nicholson. 
Deadpan, heartfelt, and everything in between, Sara Nicholson 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, whether itís ancient or contemporary. Nicholsonís 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. 
"Intimate and expansive, with dazzling wit and music throughout, Nicholson's poems fit the stars, the sun, the trees, and their sap in the same frame."--Michael Andor Brodeur, The Boston Globe 
"Nicholson wields the authority of archival rhythms and the forceful syntax of a logician, but she constantly attaches these certainties to a wildness of premise and a brevity of figure: instead of self, ruled utterance; instead of help, poetry."--Geoffrey G. O'Brien, Public Books 
Poetry.

April

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Books by Nicholson, Sara

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nicholson, Sara. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Living Method

What the Lyric Is

April