Salt Memory

by Jennifer K. Sweeney

Jennifer K. Sweeney's first book of poetry, Salt Memory, is the winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award

Genres: Poetry

81 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 2006

About the author

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three poetry collections: Little Spells, newly released from New Issues Press, How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, and Salt Memory. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Hedgebrook residency, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Award from Passages North and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg awards. Recent poems have appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Linebreak, Mid-American Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, and Verse Daily.

Reviews

[Antonia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Sweeney's first collection (she has a more recent book). It was the winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award and is reviewed by JoSelle Vanderhooft in The Pedestal Magazine, Issue Thirty-Seven.

Plenty of rich imagery and some good, fresh writing. Much nature imagery, the sea in particular. I wouldn't call it nature poetry, though. Poems about childhood, about love, about the seasons. There's a whole lot of gentleness and caring in these pieces. For the most part, the poems are tight, economical, lyrical.

Three poems from the collection are featured at Main Street Rag's site.

[Ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a solid first collection, but How to Live on Bread and Music is much better.

[Joe Brunory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing insight. An inspired collection of finely crafted poems about self and world.