Be Still: Poems for Kay Sage

When I reached the final lines of the first poem in Be Still: Poems for Kay Sage, my mouth opened-but this was only the first of several jaw-dropping moments in Nadia Arioli's new collection. Their ekphrastic poems and lyric essays draw from paintings, the artist's biography, and a deep well of personal experience, and the results are incredibly sensory pieces, a book that feels like it might burst with grief, with love, with memories that are hard to hold alone and also difficult to share. This book is for those who have never heard of Kay Sage and for those who have, for those who have been very close to depression and suicide and for those who know someone who has-which is to say, all of us need this book.

-Katie Manning, Author of Hereverent



Kay Sage might be the most underappreciated and overlooked artist of the 20th century. Be Still makes a case for Sage's relevance and genius more compellingly than any work of art criticism could. Nadia Arioli's book fully inhabits Sage's surreal landscapes, with each poem providing a map and compass for navigating the aesthetic pleasures and unconscious desires that haunted her canvases. [. . .] Arioli crafts a fluid symbiosis where Sage's vision pollinates Arioli's words [. . .] By the end of the book, it is impossible to ever view a Kay Sage painting again without hearing Arioli's voice echoing through the brushstrokes.

-Chase Dimock, Managing Editor of As It Ought To Be Magazine and Author of Sentinel Species



In Be Still, Arioli channels the paintings and life of Kay Sage to explore the oddity, the beauty, and the danger of living. In these surreal and tender poems, the speaker can be "the key that goes nowhere . . . the list in your pocket, the shrieks of a maid." [. . .] Here things have teeth. But through all the pain and strangeness, connection is the most valued commodity. Arioli writes, "I am trying to learn tenderness," and these poems are a primer for the rest of us trying to do the same.

-Donna Vorreyer, Author of To Everything There Is