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Country of Glass by Sarah Katz

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 88 pgs.
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Country of Glass by Sarah Katz is a debut collection that speaks to the fragility of our own bodies in the greater context of society and countries. In the opening poem, “The Hidden Country, I,” is mysterious and familiar all at once as animals meet and are equally “luminous,” but there’s a standoff/”stillness” that is yet to be understood. Isn’t that how it is when we meet someone new? There is that sense of awkwardness in initial meetings about how we should speak or act toward or with someone.

Katz’s poems also contain people from the WWII-era and remind us of how long trauma can impact someone, from a sister whose lost brother stalks her mind even six years on from him saving her and telling her to run (“Portrait of a Brother and Sister, 1940”) and a father who is fading before the eyes of his children and wife (“The Beginning of Prayer”). In “The End of Being Delicate,” the narrator speaks to the anxiety of being gentle in approaching a less-than-forgiving society, one that fails to embrace difference. “I think I am being gentle, I think//I have gentle thoughts about gentle things,/but my awkward voice fumbles over skin//its mouth’s ridges jerking back/a layer over a hole of throat.//” (pg. 50)

Even with all of the harsh reality of life and the fragility of living, there are poems that celebrate sensuality, connection, and even our flaws. “He bites her lip/No, it can’t be/Licks the curves of her stomach like an icy spoon.//” (from “Portrait of My Deaf Body” pg. 9). But even in these moments, there is mystery, like in “The Sun’s Song” where “The sun wishes to be known the way I want to be hidden.” (pg. 31)

In this Country of Glass, Katz warns us “But now we blink/toward endings.” Perhaps it is this caution that should give us pause. We need to focus less on the end and more on the journey of being and evolving, less on outcomes and acceptance, and more on how we wish to be as our true selves and learn that difference is our greatest gift before it is too late and “Pompeii firmly/grasping our feet/with its many hands.” (“Beyond Reykjavik” pg. 59)

RATING: Quatrain

About the Poet:

Sarah Katz is the author of Country of Glass, a poetry collection published by Gallaudet University Press in May 2022. She holds an MFA in creative writing from American University. Her poems appear in Bear Review, District Lit, Hole in the Head Review, Poetry Daily, Redivider, RHINO, Right Hand Pointing, Rogue Agent, the So to Speak blog, The Shallow Ends, War, Literature, and the Arts, and Wordgathering, among others.

She works as the Marketing Manager and Editorial Assistant for Day Eight, a DC-based poetry publisher and arts organization. She also works with Catch the Sun Media, a full-service digital marketing and social media consultancy, where she supports promotional efforts on behalf of John Barr, the inaugural president of the Poetry Foundation.

On a volunteer basis, Sarah is Poetry Editor of The Deaf Poets Society, a highly accessible online literary journal she cofounded in 2016 that features work by writers and artists with disabilities.

When she has free time, she works as a freelance editor and journalist covering disability rights issues. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Business Insider, The Guardian, OZY, The Nation, The New York Times, The Rumpus, Scientific American, Slate, The Washington Post, and other publications. She has edited for a variety of digital and print publications, including The Appeal, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Writer’s Center Magazine, Poet Lore, The Deaf Poets Society, NAD Mag (a now-defunct print magazine published by the National Association of the Deaf), and others.

Mailbox Monday #706

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Thank you to Velvet for stepping in when Mailbox Monday needed another host.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s What I Received:

Fixed Star by Suzanne Frischkorn, which I purchased.

The opening poem, “Cuban Polymita,” from which the title Fixed Star arises, serves as the scaffolding device for Frischkorn’s manuscript. Like the beautiful painted snails it references, the book, too, is a series of spirals: mainly, a pair of sonnet coronas whose recursive lines twine through the manuscript, both framing and bracing it. Navigating splits in language, geography, government, culture, and family-Frischkorn guides us through poems that are, contrapuntally, both luxuriant and lean. Swirling through this compact, honed manuscript is a series of citations (Shakespeare, John Cage, Muriel Rukeyser, John Keats, Normando Hernández González), and geographies (Cuba, Spain, Florida, Pennsylvania) that create transit across decades and differing terrains. Constellated with Latin jazz, jasper, sea glass, bougainvillea, contradanza, and coral reefs, Fixed Star is a brilliant treatise on violence, division, loss, longing, and the search for song. Simone Muench

Country of Glass by Sarah Katz, which I purchased.

Country of Glass is the debut poetry collection from Sarah Katz, who offers an exploration of the concept of precariousness as it applies to bodies, families, countries, and whole societies. Katz employs themes of illness, disability, war, and survival within the contexts of family history and global historical events. The collection moves through questions about identity, storytelling, displacement, and trauma, constructing an overall narrative about what it means to love while trying to survive. The poems in this book—which take the form of free verse, prose poems, sestinas, and erasures—attempt to address human fragility and what resilience looks like in a world where so much is uncertain.

Taste: A Book of Small Bites by Jehanne Dubrow, which I purchased.

Taste is a lyric meditation on one of our five senses, which we often take for granted. Structured as a series of “small bites,” the book considers the ways that we ingest the world, how we come to know ourselves and others through the daily act of tasting.

Through flavorful explorations of the sweet, the sour, the salty, the bitter, and umami, Jehanne Dubrow reflects on the nature of taste. In a series of short, interdisciplinary essays, she blends personal experience with analysis of poetry, fiction, music, and the visual arts, as well as religious and philosophical texts. Dubrow considers the science of taste and how taste transforms from a physical sensation into a metaphor for discernment.

Taste is organized not so much as a linear dinner served in courses but as a meal consisting of meze, small plates of intensely flavored discourse.

What did you receive?