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Sift
Two women set out through the haze of social and environmental collapse in search of fertile soil. As they travel through deserts, burned-over forests, and lightless mountain caverns, they learn to navigate the terrain of their evolving connection. An invocation, an elegy, a postcard home, Sift is a story about family wounds, humanity's failures, how to care for one another at the end, and how to make a new beginning.
"Sift reminds us that to exist is to journey through a world until only our horizon remains. To read Hattman is to put language through a sieve, and study its glimmering remains. If you look closely enough what reflects back might be your own face. A gorgeous debut about listening to the distant sounds of a world falling away, and how its echoes might spell hope."--Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily
"Alissa Hattman's Sift is an extraordinarily palpable rendition of how love and grief might be reshaped by our still-unfolding climate crisis. If there is great loss here, there is also great beauty--in the natural world, in the language that evokes it, and in the better relationships we might choose with the nonhuman and with each other."--Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
"In kinship with Octavia Butler's parables, but rooted in our time, Sift is a beautiful, pastoral novel about how to care for another when the end is coming. This is a book that is also a vision."--Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy and A Horse at Night
"Inviting and moving inside the challenges of apocalypse, Sift is tangled in love and identity and the bigness of the world in its most intimate places."--Raki Kopernik, author of The Things You Left and The Memory House
"Sift is a fractured, feverish, beautiful song of mourning and of care, its questions urgent, its melodies complex."--Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
"Borrowing from the scientific terms for plant and animal life, we are (re)introduced to ourselves on the granular level, prompting us to ask questions like 'what does it mean to be human?' 'What is a friend,' and 'do I exist even if my body has been left behind?'"--Kathleen Alcalá, author of Spirits of the Ordinary and The Flower in the Skull
"Alissa Hattman's Sift is gorgeous, fierce, and wise. In this dystopian, woman-centric landscape, the boundaries between internal and external reality are shimmeringly porous, and heartbreak and magic are intertwined. Hattman is a profoundly gifted stylist who never loses sight of the novel's deep emotional center."--Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney
"A lush and lyrical vision of growth amid environmental catastrophe Sift shows us how to grieve the past while nurturing new human connections and shared, regenerative landscapes."--Thea Prieto, author of From the Caves
"Today we are lucky to hold a book by Alissa Hattman, whose attentions to time, gradient, and tremor have always been realized through the knowledge that a world with these abilities must also hold beauty and truth. These edges, Tortula now explains repeatedly and truly, are how we learn to wonder, to trust, and crucially, to repair."--Mairead Case, author of Tiny.
"Sift reminds us that to exist is to journey through a world until only our horizon remains. To read Hattman is to put language through a sieve, and study its glimmering remains. If you look closely enough what reflects back might be your own face. A gorgeous debut about listening to the distant sounds of a world falling away, and how its echoes might spell hope."--Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily
"Alissa Hattman's Sift is an extraordinarily palpable rendition of how love and grief might be reshaped by our still-unfolding climate crisis. If there is great loss here, there is also great beauty--in the natural world, in the language that evokes it, and in the better relationships we might choose with the nonhuman and with each other."--Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
"In kinship with Octavia Butler's parables, but rooted in our time, Sift is a beautiful, pastoral novel about how to care for another when the end is coming. This is a book that is also a vision."--Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy and A Horse at Night
"Inviting and moving inside the challenges of apocalypse, Sift is tangled in love and identity and the bigness of the world in its most intimate places."--Raki Kopernik, author of The Things You Left and The Memory House
"Sift is a fractured, feverish, beautiful song of mourning and of care, its questions urgent, its melodies complex."--Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
"Borrowing from the scientific terms for plant and animal life, we are (re)introduced to ourselves on the granular level, prompting us to ask questions like 'what does it mean to be human?' 'What is a friend,' and 'do I exist even if my body has been left behind?'"--Kathleen Alcalá, author of Spirits of the Ordinary and The Flower in the Skull
"Alissa Hattman's Sift is gorgeous, fierce, and wise. In this dystopian, woman-centric landscape, the boundaries between internal and external reality are shimmeringly porous, and heartbreak and magic are intertwined. Hattman is a profoundly gifted stylist who never loses sight of the novel's deep emotional center."--Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney
"A lush and lyrical vision of growth amid environmental catastrophe Sift shows us how to grieve the past while nurturing new human connections and shared, regenerative landscapes."--Thea Prieto, author of From the Caves
"Today we are lucky to hold a book by Alissa Hattman, whose attentions to time, gradient, and tremor have always been realized through the knowledge that a world with these abilities must also hold beauty and truth. These edges, Tortula now explains repeatedly and truly, are how we learn to wonder, to trust, and crucially, to repair."--Mairead Case, author of Tiny.
126 pages, Paperback
Published September 5, 2023
5 people are currently reading
411 people want to read
About the author
Alissa Hattman
2 books54 followersAlissa Hattman is author of the novel Sift (The 3rd Thing, 2023) and the zine POST (zines + things, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Carve, The Rumpus, The Gravity of the Thing, Propeller, Big Other, Shirley Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction 2020, and she was a longlist honoree for Dzanc’s 2021 Prize for Fiction. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University and an MA in English Literature from Portland State University. Alissa has taught writing classes and workshops for over 15 years and has worked as a fiction editor, book reviewer, zine librarian, writing group facilitator, and artist-in-residence at several arts centers, most recently Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Iceland. She writes short essays for her monthly newsletter, MURMUR, which also features a small press spotlight with a book give-away and other literary updates. Originally from North Dakota, she now lives and teaches in the Pacific Northwest.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 13, 2024
This was shortlisted for the Ursula K. LeGuin prize. I see why the prize committee chose it - it fits the brief and reminds me a lot of last year's winner (Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell), though I liked that one more. This one was very short, poetic, and abstract. If that sounds good to you, you'll probably like it. For me, it felt like navel-gazing without reward. I think other readers found it profound in some way, but I have to say I really didn't. Also, it's the type of dreary apocalypse novel that typically makes my anxiety spike. There's no hope here. I dreaded reading it and was thankful it was so short - took me only 3 20-minute walking breaks at work to get through it.
May 24, 2024
Gorgeous and terrifying.
April 6, 2025
I read this novel in Galleys and wrote a review for CALYX Journal. The link: https://www.calyxpress.org/reviews/si...
November 21, 2023
One of the most unique reading experiences I have had
I felt like it was such a complete yet chaotic image
Even the Acknowledgments are creative and interesting. Like seriously... this may be the only book where I have read the acknowledgments.
Also, this part alone makes it a recommended reading experience:
"Our discoveries are fleeting, paper-thin -- they will not be remembered like this. But maybe by moss, by water running down the stone walls inside of mountains, maybe in gypsum on the bottom of oceans that are gone and the ones that will come after, wave upon wave of chalk dust. And in the landscapes of our minds -- our overactive, oversensitive minds, that will continue to interfere with all that is necessary for our survival. So be it. We know no other way.
When all is said and done, let the wind and water continue to transform the world without us.
Let us be but a breath."
That alone deserves awards.
Not to mention the tethers to Butler (mainly Parable of the Sower). Big recommend.
I felt like it was such a complete yet chaotic image
Even the Acknowledgments are creative and interesting. Like seriously... this may be the only book where I have read the acknowledgments.
Also, this part alone makes it a recommended reading experience:
"Our discoveries are fleeting, paper-thin -- they will not be remembered like this. But maybe by moss, by water running down the stone walls inside of mountains, maybe in gypsum on the bottom of oceans that are gone and the ones that will come after, wave upon wave of chalk dust. And in the landscapes of our minds -- our overactive, oversensitive minds, that will continue to interfere with all that is necessary for our survival. So be it. We know no other way.
When all is said and done, let the wind and water continue to transform the world without us.
Let us be but a breath."
That alone deserves awards.
Not to mention the tethers to Butler (mainly Parable of the Sower). Big recommend.
July 29, 2024
Of all the books on the Ursula K Le Guin prize shortlist, this was the only one I wasn't able to easily source a copy of. All but one of the others are available as ebooks, and
The Skin and its Girl
- which has no digital edition in the UK - is readily available in bookshops. *Sift*, on the other hand, is very hard to get hold of here, and I went to great lengths to try and find a US-based store that would ship it to the UK without my needing to take out mortgage to make it happen. I'm glad that I went to the effort, though, because this is great.
The book arrived at my house today and I honestly wasn't expecting to read it so soon, especially as I'm still partway through last year's Booker Prize winner Prophet Song. But the physical book is a real thing of beauty and once I realised it's a novella and barely 100 pages long, I decided to sit down with it this afternoon.
Sift will inevitably be compared to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and it's an apt comparison in a lot of ways. Both deal with a pair of mostly-nameless characters travelling across a hostile, ravaged world in search of a new beginning. But where *The Road* is almost unrelentingly bleak, giving us only a glimmer of hope at the end that we fear might be snuffed out at any moment. Here the hope is more substantial, brought to us through the human connections that we cling to and nurture even through catastrophe.
Hattman's writing is spare and haunting, at times feeling like prose poetry. The story is painted in brief vignettes that slowly deliver us a fragmented mosaic of meaning to piece together. Though the subject matter is vastly different there's an ethereal, fragmented, dreamlike quality to the prose that reminded me in places of Jenny Offill's Weather. This is a really beautiful piece of work, and it's going to stick with me for a long time.
The book arrived at my house today and I honestly wasn't expecting to read it so soon, especially as I'm still partway through last year's Booker Prize winner Prophet Song. But the physical book is a real thing of beauty and once I realised it's a novella and barely 100 pages long, I decided to sit down with it this afternoon.
Sift will inevitably be compared to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and it's an apt comparison in a lot of ways. Both deal with a pair of mostly-nameless characters travelling across a hostile, ravaged world in search of a new beginning. But where *The Road* is almost unrelentingly bleak, giving us only a glimmer of hope at the end that we fear might be snuffed out at any moment. Here the hope is more substantial, brought to us through the human connections that we cling to and nurture even through catastrophe.
Hattman's writing is spare and haunting, at times feeling like prose poetry. The story is painted in brief vignettes that slowly deliver us a fragmented mosaic of meaning to piece together. Though the subject matter is vastly different there's an ethereal, fragmented, dreamlike quality to the prose that reminded me in places of Jenny Offill's Weather. This is a really beautiful piece of work, and it's going to stick with me for a long time.
September 8, 2023
Alissa Hattman does in 106 pages what so many others don’t do in one thousand. Via gorgeous sentence after gorgeous sentence, she conjures such a rich (and devastated) world, and she says so much about trauma, grief, love, and hope without ever needing to come out and say it. I’m still not quite sure how she managed to make this story feel at once so bleak, so hopeful, and so honest. What a book.
December 21, 2023
A powerful meditation on change--climate change, personal change, perhaps even evolutionary change. Poetic, moving, and memorable, a unique contribution to the emerging body of climate literature.
December 21, 2023
A powerful meditation on memory and connection, on nature and letting go, and what it means to exist in a world for people, when there are no people around.
April 28, 2024
Post-apocalypse road trip poetry. Makes you dizzy, makes you cry.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews