Ordinary Fissures

Sara Eddy's Ordinary Fissures is a splendid collection: dark, comic, loving, sad, disappointed, vulnerable, and-yes-confessional. These are poems both learned and filled with the language we speak, poems painfully, lyrically honest as one after the other they sing of the uncertainties attendant upon getting through each day. Her memories are haunting, and they can sting like those bees and nettles she often sings of. And, yet, how cathartic they are, treading into the dark woods, then bringing us back into a better understanding of who we are, and who we might be, if we only stopped to pay attention to the words she sings.

-Paul Mariani, author of All That Will Be New



There's a palpable urgency to these intimate, brazen, and heartfelt poems in which the speaker attends to life's cracks and splits. This is a book packed with gorgeous acts of close-looking, not just at our dark caverns and broken places, but also at the natural world. These pages carry quiet grace and fierce rage, all the while insisting that no matter the storms and dark waters we might encounter, we have power "to tack or jibe/ grip time by the boom and face the wind / or give it our backs."

-Matt Donovan, author of The Dug-Up Gun Museum



Sara Eddy begins with a "feral scrambling thrust" and holds us throughout in her wild embrace. Ordinary Fissures weaves a life well lived with the natural world: a girl becomes a lover new in their "body and luscious / with love," then a mother who asks "What power we have, to decide what is past, / what is present, to take control." Eddy's power lives in her ability to root her narrative in woods and ponds, in the smell of hyacinths, in the shapes of condor, sow, buffalo. Ordinary Fissures proves that even on the days when it is "too much, to be a woman, there is beauty and glory in the world.

-Allison Blevins, author of Cataloguing Pain