Impact

by Sarah Renee Beach

Through her debut chapbook, Impact, Sarah Renee Beach explicates the grief, violence, and emptiness that fill the space of a traumatic loss. Impact—the winner of Sundress Publications’ 2022 Annual Chapbook Contest—navigates the devastation caused by a horrific bus accident, including the impersonal, unsympathetic process of legal questioning, and follows Beach coping with her complex feelings towards the driver and attempting to reckon with the death of her friends and fellow passengers. Beach exposes her difficult, nonlinear healing process through the careful utilization of different formal elements, from the epistolary style to erasure to frenetically scattered lines and stanzas. Each poem is a tremor, rippling out from the initial incident, revealing another reverberation of her journey in the aftermath. Ultimately, Impact serves as a tender eulogy to both her lost friends and to her life before loss.

Genres: Poetry

37 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 2023