Publisher's Synopsis
"With virtuoso craft and a naturalist's accuracy, CJ Sage reinvents the nature poem for the 21st century.... Inside this wondrous contemporary bestiary Sage investigates the interactions of animals and humans, using her poems for a complex apprehension of our world... Is it possible to resist playing on this poet's surname? CJ Sage works her words with a zesty ease, offering us both curative herb and wise prophecy"
Molly Peacock
"CJ Sage distills the cadences of faith and flourish into a gorgeous bestiary. Donkeys, egrets, zebras, snails, skunks-and more-reside in a beautifully rendered world where 'the clicks of gate locks croon' and we can see 'a thousand rows of spiny safflower heads'. Sage blends meditations on animals familiar and strange, and moves between observations of these wilder landscapes and our own backyards to 'remind us what we do'."
Margot Schilpp
"These poems read like a phantasmagoric zoo-a restless, and relentless, collection of beasts created by sound-play, hallucination, and pleasure. There is a feeling of idée fixe, of obsession, that drives this poet onward to build a linguistic Island of Dr. Moreau where dream and the subconscious are barely contained by the rational impulses of language-to fascinating effect."
Larissa Szporluk
CJ Sage's poems appear in publications such as The Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Threepenny Review, among others. She edits The National Poetry Review and Press and works as a Realtor in Santa Cruz and surrounding counties. Sage resides in Rio Del Mar, California, a coastal town on the Monterey Bay.
