Year by Year Poems

Poetry. Film. When filmmaker Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs' life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, YEAR BY YEAR POEMS juxtaposes Sachs' finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts. In this way, she reveals her process of navigating within and alongside historical events such as the Moon Landing, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., streaking, the Anita Hill hearings, the Columbine shootings, and controversies around universal health care. In YEAR BY YEAR POEMS, Lynne Sachs realizes the long anticipated leap from her extraordinary career in filmmaking to this, her first book of poems. With an introduction by Paolo Javier, former Queens poet laureate and author of the book Court of the Dragon.

The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne Sachs shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.--Phillip Lopate

The highly acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is also a captivating and surprising poet. YEAR BY YEAR distills five decades into lyric, a lustrous tapestry woven of memory, wisdom, cultural apprehension and the delicate specificities of lived life.--Claire Messud

In YEAR BY YEAR, Lynne Sachs selects and distills from larger fields of notation, acute scenes representing her life and the world she was born into. Her measured, spare account brings her to an understanding and acceptance of the terrible and beautiful fact that history both moves us and moves through us, and, more significantly, how by contending with its uncompromising force, we define an ethics that guides our fate.--Michael Collier

Renowned experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs wrote one of 2019's best books of poetry. In 2011, after deciding to write one poem for each of the fifty years of her life, Sachs asked herself, 'How have the private, most intimate moments of my life been affected by the public world beyond?' The graceful, diaristic poems that she went on to produce successfully distill events and themes in the poet's life and simultaneously, magically, reflect larger movements of history and culture. Intimate and imagistic, the poems unfold a series of miniature stories with sensuous rhythms, telling visual detail, and gentle humor. Thus in '1969' a young Sachs imagines Neil Armstrong calling on the telephone, then turning 'to look at all of us (from the moon).' This beautifully designed book includes facsimiles of many of the poetry's initial drafts, which subtly illumine this artist's creative process.--San Francisco Public Library Staff Pick

As an artist, Sachs keeps playing, again and again, with each of the thirty-three films she has made over the decades and now, with her first book of poems, which are just as inventive and fresh, just as delightfully playful with form. These poems are innovative but never intimidating or deliberately opaque. Instead, they invite us in, encouraging us to play along. They give us a structure to enter into our own retrospective lives, our own distillations of time, our own superimpositions of the newsworthy world onto our most intimate moments.--Sharon Harrigan, Cleaver Magazine