Forgive the Animal: Poems

by Sarah Pape

Forgive the Animal, the luminous and stunning debut collection from Sarah Pape, explores rural poverty, sexual abuse and its reverberations, young motherhood, and the path back to oneself through forgiveness of the self and others. With environmental collapse, too, as both metaphor and reality, Pape's poems seek to understand a future after surviving multiple shattering events, in both the personal and collective experiences of great loss.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

Published September 16, 2024

Reviews

[Patricia Murphy]

Worlds and memories collide in Sarah Pape’s Forgive the Animal--against a stark landscape of slip sinkers and jerk bait, falling-down houses and azaleas, aluminum boats, and rotary phones-- the speaker in these poems is capable of profound self-reflection and self-knowledge. Sewn across decades in a small town that could be the reader’s own small town, the tapestry of “surviving young” blooms to life. Somehow the speaker in these poems untangles her complex family history just in time to make her own.

[Jo]

This lush and lyrical collection by an underrated poet gave me all the feels. Highly recommend.