Let’s Not Live on Earth

Sarah Blake

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780819577665
• eBook ISBN:
  9780819577672
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Sarah Blake follows up her previous book of poetry, Mr. West, with a stunning second collection about anxieties and injury. Blake uses self-consciousness as a tool for transformation, looking so closely at herself that she moves right through the looking glass and into the larger world. Fear becomes palpable through the classification of monsters and through violences made real. When the poems find themselves in the domestic realm, something is always under threat. The body is never safe, nor are the ghosts of the dead. But these poems are not about cowering. By detailing the dangers we face as humans, as Americans, and especially as women, these poems suggest we might find a way through them. The final section of the book is a feminist, science fiction epic poem, "The Starship," which explores the interplay of perception and experience as it follows the story of a woman who must constantly ask herself what she wants as her world shifts around her. Please note the hardcover is unjacketed.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Suicide Prevention
• Retribution
• The E-Ray Is a Gun
• One Doctor Leads to the Next
• Mothers
• I Thought It Was a Good Idea to Walk to CVS with My Son on a Ninety-Degree Day
• Everything Small
• Two Oaks
• Rats
• For Max
• A Threat
• Mouths at the Party
• The Safety of Women
• You Are Connected to Everything
• Monsters
• Watching TV, Seeing the Shot Woman
• A Poem for My Son
• Easier to Write the Poem Where I’m the Queen
• In February 2015
• My Obsession with Just Is My Obsession with the Temporal
• The World
• Dear Gun
• How We Might Survive
• Neutron Star
• The Starship
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author