Never One for Promises

I studied music for years. All of those years learning to read the notes and play in rhythm was an education in itself and paved the way for poetry. But Sarah Etlinger's poetry is music, an education in the rhythm and space of silence within those musical melodies. I first read her work when she submitted to The Magnolia Review, and I was immediately captivated. I rarely accept entire packets, but Etlinger's was one of the few. Etlinger's poetry is a beautiful collection of images of lovers and how they connect and disconnect. From Noah to Zeus to Kant readers to God on the subway, Etlinger carries the reader through a narrative of love, hope, and loss.

In "Summer Aubade," the speaker begins "Sometimes we feel more than we ever are: // hammocked in your arms / we fade into summer's / constellations / ... until dawn erases the stars." Such a beautiful way to end a poem! The depth of Etlinger's word choice is striking in every line, a word never out of place, a line break just so pretty perfect that I can't imagine this poem existing in a different way. Her word choices are precise and open the world into possibilities that I couldn't imagine without her voicing them. Images I've seen but haven't described in such gorgeous detail. I can't even choose a favorite poem because I love them all.

I hope the reader enjoys every word in this collection as much as I have. Definitely on the list of poetry that I will come back repeatedly. Etlinger's work is a presence you need in your life.

Suzannah Anderson, Editor in Chief at The Magnolia Review:

In "Still Life with Poetry," one of the brilliant poems in this rich and lovely collection, the speaker eyes a lover about to be abandoned by her partner and wishes to advise her to "keep reading Yeats and Rilke and the sonnets/keep their heartbreak on your sleeve." Indeed, after you lay down Sarah Etlinger's collection, Never One for Promises, its poignant images, precise and rich language, and complex rhythms will similarly clothe you. Conjoined in these pages is the celestial with the earthly, the mythic with the mundane, certainty with faithlessness. Here is a eulogy for the brevity of passion and, at the same time, a reverence for the past. Here is the familiar, persistent desire to make sense of the (love) stories we inherit, to understand how they shape us, to weigh our efforts to reshape them. Here is a world that compels us toward promises we know we cannot keep and so do not make: to love better, to be kinder, to give ourselves wholly over to martyrdom, for the ones we love, for the strangers in libraries, for our past selves, our present selves. Here is the unforgiving world in which "in the morning, demons come out in layers" and lovers suffer "the hungry teeth of women." Here we recognize that the ones we care for must be treated mercilessly, like geraniums cut back so they "have no choice but to bloom." It is a world in which the body serves as both love letter and confession, invocation and hex. It is one in which lovers write each other into being, etching "holy watermarks, prayer scars, and tattooed bands of tefillin" on vulnerable skin; it is one in which Noah's wife mourns "this whole complicated business of pairing,"; in which Gods mingle with us in the subways; in which goddesses long for the sharp blade of the razor.

Dr. Elizabeth Johnston, Founder of Straw Mat Writers and Professor