Each Knuckle with Sugar - by Sarah Levine (Paperback)

About the Book

Sarah Levine's Each Knuckle with Sugar is a soft yet powerful deep-dive into love and grief told through multiple fascinating perspectives.

Book Synopsis

Sarah Levine's Each Knuckle with Sugar is a soft yet powerful deep-dive into love and grief told through multiple fascinating perspectives.

This powerful collection looks at longing and grief with sensitivity and care. What does it mean for desire to be born out of loss? How are relationships born?

Each Knuckle with Sugar answers these questions with precise language and intimate details that pull the reader in close. In these poems, the complexity of love is teased out with the gentlest comb, revealing stark truths about connection.

The precision of line breaks and word choice in this collection is stunning. These poems feature nature imagery mixed with incisive details about the body. In these pieces, love is an all encompassing and well-studied geography.

Each Knuckle with Sugar is a quietly devastating but ultimately hopeful look at burgeoning love. Simply put, Sarah Levine has written one of contemporary poetry's strongest collections of poems about the mixture of grieving and loving.

This collection also features a bespoke interview with the writer at then end of the book, delving deeper into the craft, influences, and life behind their work.

Review Quotes

"I love this book. [...] Look, some of its tanginess may leap off the page and startle your fingers. Some of its honey may stick to your knuckles. Let it."

- Chen Chen,

author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

"I have been reading Sarah Levine's poems for the past decade and in this luminous first collection she fulfills the promise of her earlier work. Each Knuckle with Sugar explores the romantic relationship between Herman and Begonia who meet at his mother's funeral. Each poem in which they inhabit is vivid, lyrical, poignant, often passionate and always intimate. As their relationship matures the metaphoric language is never predictable, a touch eccentric and always blissfully original. Read these poems and I guarantee you will bask in their humanity and, ultimately, be transformed in the mystery of their elegance."

- Kevin Pilkington,

author of Playing Poker with Tennessee Williams

"Sarah Levine's award-winning debut collection introduces us to Herman and Begonia, two people who embark on a love affair as they try to find a way out of a landscape stripped bare by loneliness and grief. There is a strangeness, an intensity, a blurring of the real and the surreal that makes this tale of love and loss intimate and authentic. Levine has a strong command of the image, metaphor and simile, that renders these poems vivid and dreamlike. If there is grief, there is also humor: Herman's lists of questions to ask Begonia on their dates are original, to say the least. As they speak in turn, in their fragmented voices, Herman and Begonia become achingly human, their need for love and their thwarted attempts at salvation all too familiar."

- Martín Espada, author of Floaters