Inevitable What

These gorgeous poems are haunting, intimate, incantatory. Sarah Lyn Rogers’s intelligence, sensitivity, depth and wit exude from her lines. And she does not waste a word. Her control of craft leads to an explosion of meaning: “muted...And yet expansive.” – Kate Evans, author of Call It Wonder: An Odyssey of Love, Sex, Spirit, and Travel (Coyote Creek Books)

Sarah Lyn Rogers’s voice cuts through the clamor of everyday life, not by simplifying it or turning a deaf ear but by opening itself fully to the glorious cacophony. Juxtaposing popular music with Buddhist ritual, quotidian housework with arcane witchcraft, these poems ache to capture the flux and inconsistency of our world, knowing success or failure is secondary to the attempt itself: to make meaning, to tame chaos, above all to connect. “Like pushing a stone upslope sometimes / this need to speak, to explain / exactly what we mean”—Rogers meets this Sisyphean challenge with remarkable poise and music. – Andrew Altschul, author of Lady Lazarus (Harcourt)

Sarah Lyn Rogers’s book, Inevitable What, crackles with music and magic and the awareness of unseen mysteries enfolding the most ordinary days. Whether she is calling for rain, washing dishes in a steaming kitchen, or listening to the incantations of a foreign tongue, Rogers’s poems remain fine-tuned to language’s elegant rhythms. They reveal the spells we devise to make meaning of our lives. – Sally Ashton, author of Some Odd Afternoon (BlazeVOX[books])