The Deletions

Sarah Green's The Deletions is a spiritual and psychological reckoning with ecological grief, infertility grief, and the loss of a marriage. These poems live at the intersection of ode and elegy, simultaneously observing and reflecting upon multiple kinds of love (friendship, romance, family). With a tone that ranges from poignant to stoic and from playful to irreverent, the speaker sifts through generational layers of divorce, revisiting the violence of teen girlhood and ultimately rediscovering her own resilience. Sarah Green is the author of a previous collection, Earth Science (421 Atlanta), and the editor of Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence (Ohio University Press.) She has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at St. Cloud State University. How do we build beauty around absence; or, perhaps even more eerie, how do we scaffold presence around the act of disappearing? This poet uses masterful storytelling, personal revelation, and shapely, musical stanzas to unpack the lonely spaces of contemporary life. A straightforward litany of The Deletions' themes-elegy, divorce, infertility, climate change-pales beside the realized ache of the individual moment, shot through with wry and exacting wit: "I think he thinks I'm sedated but I am just / awake saying hi to everyone like usual except / there's iodine on my torso / there's lidocaine in my feelings." These poems gather a lifetime of loss into their arms, crush the reader into that messy embrace, and defiantly holler towards hope. Sarah Green is a luminous poet of wrenching separations, painfully attuned to the negative space visual artists speak of often: if the figure is gone, if the dream unanswered, what becomes of the ground on which such figures and forces lived? The brilliance of The Deletions is the spiritual and poetic cunning through which Green speaks toward stricken ground, allowing no single experience to govern the arc of this beautifully human book. Then, what's the story? The soul is the story, and the ground, and the field, and Sarah Green tends it all. Sarah Green has made a book that feels like an idyllic underground park for wonderful weirdos in a land of mechanical catastrophe. The book never blinks when I expect it to. Rather it cradles and nudges me closer to words, places, breaths I've been unable to conjure. Just another kind of ecstatic possibility here in these pages.