The Work of Days – Sarah Lang
Surprisingly, Sarah has a wordpress! You can check here out here if you want to know more about her and her work (there’s pictures too *wink*). Oddly enough, I can’t find a biography on her… (*__*) I should’ve skipped to the back of the book.
Sarah Lang was born in the winter of 1980, in Northwestern Canada. In the spring of 2004, she completed her MFA at Brown University and in the fall of 2005, she started to work on her PhD in Chicago. Her work varies between poetry, prose, personal, critical and medical essays; they were all published in Canada, Great Britain, and the US. This is her first book. When I first picked up the book, The Work of Days, I never really thought it would be interesting because of the title, the faded out chemistry on the front cover, and the fact that she wasted paper on a book that at the most has thirty words per page; but on the sparkle side (I know you’re probably wondering “what the heck is she thinking?” but I actually like the phrase) her poems make NO sense whatsoever to me, but that’s what I like about it. Most poets/writers write about things that will make you zoom in on a specific idea, but these poems make you go on an epic journey. A journey with millions of destinations and one starting point. A journey that doesn’t really end, because of the wide variety of possibilities. A jounrey that could mean one thing today, but another tomorrow. One poem of hers I totally fell inlove with is in part two of her book:
For three inches, I turned the knife in your neck. I watched
the word covet. For forty-five days, I missed your hair.
In a borrowed apartment, I held this contentment. You gagged
as a slit shell. Your eyes opened as the blue wing of a jay, as
yawn. My tongue in your ear listened to your throat
sing. Those weren’t scabs you fingered, but you always did sail
clean on through. For your olives and dry cleaning. For your happiness,
I opened as an unused window, without grace and wailing.
