Sarabande Books: 84 books

"A whirling, Dionysian poet. . . . Dwyer negotiates brazenly with huge tracts of the human condition. Her leaping imagination will make you laugh out loud. The poems in Belle Laide are a rodeo; hang on to your saddle, cowboy."-Tony HoaglandA man with a shovel in his hand / is a sexy thing.I...

Jeff Dolven’s poems take the guise of fables, parables, allegories, jokes, riddles, and other familiar forms. So, there is an initial comfort: I remember this, the reader thinks, from the stories of childhood . . . . But wait, something is off. In each poem, an uncanny conceit surprises the form, a...

Francesca Chabrier’s poems hold on to the possibility that the sorrowing parts of our lives may be transformed. The collection offers loose, sensuous, gentle associations, combined the interplay of comic and coy images. A debut of remarkable freshness and delight, through which syntactic innovation yields new meaning. Chabrier's poems entertain, startle, cast a spell, and bless.

Influenced by survival lessons from the natural world, Cleopatra Mathis’ Book of Dog traces a harrowing personal journey from hard endings-a divorce, the death of a beloved dog-to the fierce arrival of acceptance and change. All manner of life thrives in these pages–plovers, foxes, the companionable...

“[Paula] Bohince is more naturalist than romantic, meaning that her poems above all honor their dark side, their realism, their edge.”—Stanley PlumlySpanning decades and set on a decrepit farm, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods begins with a speaker invoking her dead father. As details...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author details an unconsummated love affair that sustains political, philosophical, and sexual interest over a lifetime. The truth is always different from what anyone says out loud, but who really cares? Not I, said the man I chose to be, nor I nor I nor I— among...

Selected by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Fludde draws on Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to critique and dismantle contemporary American values and conditioning: commodification, imperialism, toxic masculinity. Surreal and satirical, Mishler channels the...

“Explores the poetry in dynamic facts, and accumulates stories where life and life’s enterprises meet . . . A lovely debut” (Thalia Field, author of Experimental Animals).   In her daring essay collection, author Ashley Butler engages the reader in an exploration of her mother’s death...

“Exceptionally compelling . . . even the stories without surreal contours seem to be set in a world that is not quite our own.” —New York Daily News   The stories in Rise are fairytales, except that the witch, lucky Hans, and the frog prince are characters at the fringes of everyday life....

A woman’s “masterful . . . involving and page-turning” venture into the violent world of mixed martial arts (Gary Shteyngart). A provocative question is asked in this “knockout of a nonfiction debut” (O, the Oprah Magazine) and New York Times Book Review, NPR, Slate, and Time Magazine...

"The poems in Antiquity very much abandon themselves to language, to the collective poetic endeavor, and they do so in a rich, textured, and sustained voice."—Mary Ruefle, from the introduction   Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Michael Homolka’s Antiquity offers...

“From the absurdly comic to the acutely moving”—eleven fearless stories of love, friendship, faith and family under siege (The New York Times Book Review). Stretching from 19th century Ellis Island to 21st century Gaza and suburban Ohio, “these 11 stories, each ambitious in scope, drop...

An otherworldly short story collection that shines “a glaring light on the complexities of human personality and family relationships” (Kirkus Reviews).   “Paul Griner is a daredevil storyteller. . . . Anyone who cares about the short story—or just loves good writing—should make a beeline...

The poems of Witch Wife are spells, obsessive incantations to exorcise or celebrate memory, to mourn the beloved dead, to conjure children or keep them at bay, to faithfully inhabit one’s given body. In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems and free verse, Kiki Petrosino summons history’s ghosts-the ancestors that reside in her blood and craft-and sings them to life.