The Green Lives - by Sara Gilmore (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

It's a month, a year. Wander, tramp, escape, trespass: people have every reason under the sun--and no reason at all. In new syntax and a fitful sense of the poetic line, The Green Lives finds joy in paradoxes from which felt sense can expand. It opens in familiar signs (safehouse, railroad, dog) that are made strange in their service to warn or welcome. In its turn, a reversal of place emerges where no marker will be left: an example of yellow petals, a thousand miles of strip malls, air filling with dust, glitter, and sulfur. Ever receptive to beautiful intrusion, so fast, Gilmore reckons with the infinite.

Review Quotes

"In the old fable of the lyric, the poet steps away from the fire circle, the mass, the crowd--steps away, for a moment, from the world--to receive a message about reality. A message which the poet must assiduously write down, as clearly as they can; must run back, sweating or composed, and deliver to inhospitable us. This is the fable and work of the poem. It has nothing to do with a career. It is about "the way, see, we are alive." Sara Gilmore's The Green Lives is a very new and powerful flashing up of this oldest lyric labor. Its syntax discloses--and I mean this--a new English by which we might speak what we now can only feel. These poems structure our attention like lightning does, striking into a landscape. There is kin to Niedecker here, and Notley, and the psalms; there is also the linoleum and youtube and vending machine horizon of the low-wage American Midwest. Like the "swan's long landing", the poems in this book are "speaking the lake they land." They are the poems of our climate. They terrify as they console."--Timmy Straw, author of The Thomas Salto

"In Sara Gilmore's winding, ranging poems, terrible beauty surges against "weeping description" with incredible syntactical force. And through all these "unusual places that guiltily switch," I'm haunted by the love and suffering that attend the unequal forms in which we are bound to and claim one another -- "my man," "my child," "my mind," "myself." That's why this writing does not rest, it moves. And in this attuned motion, form and language bloom into total potency."--Benjamin Krusling

"These poems churn with Heraclitean fire. Time flows back and forth through Gilmore's vital syntax to reveal "no order as a serious way." Sharing warnings and verdant knowledge, guided by a clear-eyed heart, souls navigate the fluctuating rooms and roads and waters of this flickering world under "sky's red pixels." The Green Lives is both moving record and exhilarating prophecy."--Margaret Ross

"Gilmore's intuitive, nearly prescient, voice reads as if it were a whisper or hymn. Through quiet permission and heather in the grammar, Gilmore's debut work finds feelings in the abandon and serves as evidence of her wisdom and place as one of poetry's greats."--m.s. RedCherries

About the Author

Sara Gilmore (Author)
Sara Gilmore's poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Ugly Duckling Presse's Second Factory and 6x6, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere, and her work has been supported by an Iowa Arts Fellowship and Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Iowa. She lived for seventeen years in Seville, Spain, and now lives in Iowa City with her young son. She has worked extensively on translating the work of Antonio Gamoneda.