WHAT ENTERS THE MOUTH

By Sarah Jefferis

 

“These are fearless poems–a reckoning of the violences of girlhood rendered with grit and clarity. What Enters the Mouth is a brave collection that wrestles with loss and pain, and strides beautifully into a power and wildness of womanhood that refuses to be contained.” – Ansel Elkins, author of Blue Yodel, winner of the 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition

 

“Sarah Jefferis is an inventor, a truth teller, a fabricator, a witness. Like Dickinson, she dwells in possibilities. She constructs alternate lives [“I could have been my sister…my mother” or “My other body is the sea.”]. She’s “the other in the room.” If these stances seem contradictory, they are in the service of the deep mysteries of surviving and desiring. This book has a licked clean, all in, unreasonable, unafraid, incendiary, vulnerable and startling reckoning I admire.” – Bruce Smith, author of The Other Lover and Devotions

 

“At times tender, at times raging, at times both, the poetry of Sarah Jefferis speaks to that which polite society, particularly the polite society of the South, prefers to ignore or demean as unspeakable. Here is a poetry of hunger and the strength to bear it, of love and the courage to live it, of wisdom and the vigilance to question it. Brave is too small a word. A skillful writer, Jefferis has gifted us a beautiful collection crafted with intelligence, wit, and transcendent hope.” – Jose A. Rodriguez, author of House Built on Ashes: A Memoir, and The Shallow End of Sleep

 

90 pages