Sometimes We Walk With Our Nails Out - Sarah Bartlett

Praise for Sometimes We Walk With Our Nails Out

I’ve encountered few poets who write with Sarah Bartlett’s precision. These are poems made of animals and fur, teeth and bone, and the sparking ends of connection. Each creates a world, then destroys and mythologizes that world. Bartlett’s work is a delicious yet terrifying remaking of reality in that each detail simultaneously resists and welcomes what it describes in a manner both playful and deadly. These poems push me to an edge and keep me there. This is what I want from poetry.

~ EMILY KENDAL FREY

Sarah Bartlett’s poems are like icicles: crystalline, delicious, and capable of taking you down. “We practice keeping our distances intact,” she writes in the stunning title poem of this collection, & that practice is both a feint and a condition—the intimacy offered here, tender, goofy, and seething, is predicated on the artist’s cool reserve. This book might promise you cornbread, but it’ll be wolverine cornbread, and soon you won’t want any other kind.

~ JOHN BEER