Paper, Cotton, Leather
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Praise for Paper, Cotton, Leather Eloquent, wistful, and inventive, Jenny Sadre-Orafai's first book proves “everywhere is an atlas.” She enlarges moments of wonderment and sadness into poems that map radiant intimacies and flickering bonds. Her vivid and exact phrasing streamlines lines, amplifies sonic pleasures. Syllables tick forward beautifully: “Gutting this love, I listen for the grind/ still.” Paper, Cotton, Leather is an exhilarating and moving debut. —Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning Haunting as a fever dream, this debut collection from Jenny Sadre-Orafai is at once tender and bold, vulnerable and unflinching. Paper, Cotton, Leather, an intimate look at a relationship unraveled, marries immaculate craftsmanship and tensile language to create poems that vibrate with their urgency. The brevity of Sadre-Orafai's poems belies an elegant narrative arc that is compelling in its universality and heartbreaking in its honesty. —Kelly Davio, author of Burn This House Beginnings are scary, first steps or first steps away, but it is that foundational and fundamental energy which infuses the poems in this book, causes them to glow at the seams. Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s poetry, each line of it, creates a fragile and halting world. Her poems are so painful and playful, so fractured and effervescent, that I completely forget to be terrified about life’s beginnings and endings. —Nate Pritts, author of Right Now More Than Ever The specter of divorce haunts Sadre-Orafai’s debut, although Paper, Cotton, Leather is much more than a lyrical response to loss. Paper, Cotton, Leather is an instruction manual for the amateur anthropologist, the domestic ghost-hunter, and the doomsday prepper. In “Retract or Recant,” Sadre-Orafai writes: "I was taught curve into the slide/when spinning on frozen road.” This is exactly what Paper, Cotton, Leather can teach us: how to navigate the heart’s switchbacks, how to survive a spin-out on its loneliest back roads. —Shelley Puhak, author of Guinevere in Baltimore
ISBN
978-1-941209-10-3
Publication Date
9-2014
Publisher
Press 53
City
Winston-Salem, NC
Keywords
poetry
Disciplines
Poetry