Sad Math: Poems

by Sarah Freligh

Winner of the 2015 Moon City Poetry Prize

In Sad Math , Sarah Freligh takes us for a ride through an American girlhood, a retrospective landscape of parking in cars and illicit kisses in a Donut Delite. Here, time is measured not only in days and years but in physical distance, a past that is understandable only when viewed through a rearview mirror. Along the way, there are not only losses, but also the accumulation of experience and the insistence of possibility.

Genres: Poetry

118 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2015

Reviews

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sarah Freligh's book comes swathed in blurbs, paragraphs of praise it doesn't need. I didn't read them. Its cover was enough to prompt me to open the book, to read the first poem that met me –

SHUT UP, PLEASE,
I'M SPEAKING

of love. You remember. We made it
once in a crummy motel near Binghamton

while snow fell, four inches in an hour.
The curtains gaped, admitting a slice

of light that cut your back in half while
all night clouds shaped like potatoes

floated across the TV screen. Afterward
you untangled the sheet from our feet,

rolled wordless into sleep leaving me
to stare at your back, smooth as the motel

soap fresh from the wrapper. Like love
was before I said it out loud and someone

in the next room fisted the wall, shouted
at me to please shut the fuck up.

and I held it in my fist next to the coffee and said No don't shut up, tell me more – and she did, every line strong, sometimes funny, sometimes sticky with blood or tears or the seed of a second-string quarterback or the warm gush of Juicy Fruit, but strong.

and though this is the fifth time Charlotte

has died my mother is crying again and we're laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief

multiplies the one preceding it

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh wow. What a fantastic little tome.

I don't remember where I originally heard of Sarah Freligh. I just know that I read one poem and immediately emailed my local bookstore and asked them to order this book for me.

I've been reading it slowly ever since, savoring it. There are so many pages folded over...

My favorite poem by far is the opening poem: Starting With An Old Photo Of My Mother And Ending On A Hill - it is full of beautiful, lonely images. There are so many others, though, that are at the top of my list: My Friend, Notes On "Mother Holding Child" Kodacolor Print Circa 1952, Shut Up Please I'm Speaking, Old Flame... The list may as well be her table of contents.

If you like narrative verse, buy this book. If you like books that get to the heart of friendships, family, aging... buy this book. If you like brave, brave words, buy this book. If you want your heart to be broken, buy this book.... Just buy this book. It's such a fantastic collection of poetry. I absolutely cannot wait to read more from Freligh.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

So excited to have stumbled across this poet. Great flow of poems here, almost a novella in poem form. But the poems themselves are powerful, funny. So many of them capture that small moment from a fresh angle.

Looking forward to Sort of Gone...

[Alicia Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful poems that know a lot of "loss and its sad math." A must read.

[Alyisha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think maybe I took too long to finish this collection, took too long of a break in the middle, & lost the thread of it and its essence. I loved the final poem, "Wondrous" (a line from which provides the title for the entire collection).

Major themes are: youth, pregnancy, mother/daughter relationships, giving a baby up for adoption, loss of a parent, aging.

The purple trumpets of petunias are juxtaposed with cigarette butts & bad mayonnaise. The word “fart” appears multiple times. Life is a mixed bag.

[Sarah M. Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are smart and gritty poems of grief, humanity, and sex. Loved hearing this voice and this music of language.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous, spare, elegant poems that trace life like lines on a palm. Highly recommended especially for people who claim they don't "get" poetry. These poems don't wait to be "gotten," they get you.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah Freligh’s Sad Math draws you into its black and white, working-class landscape of cigarettes, Kmart parking lots, motels and bars like a slow blues. It’s a world that’s hollow at its center, an emptied womb, a world emptier still “because we know our babies are not ours at all,” because “the Gone will haunt us,” because “of loss and its sad math . . .” One feels taken to a contemporary version of Fitzgerald’s valley of ashes, to a place where our Godforsaken can take solace only in the realization that “You are not dead. You are not there yet.” Freligh’s arresting poems grapple with the math, show the work, and attempt to substantiate a blue-collar past in a way that makes better sense than did the experience of living it.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Sad Math, poet Sarah Freligh explores the stark working-class world of cigarettes, booze, and parking lots, all the while exploring narrative stories from voices often dismissed in literature. We hear the stories of unwed mothers who give up their children for adoption. We hear the stories of waitresses suffering from more than just a "bad day of work." We hear the story of a woman who is mourning both her mother and a beloved pet. Freligh doesn't shy away from saying what needs to be said, yet it's easy to fall in love with the characters and narrators in this wonderful collection.

[Renée Roehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book from it's gorgeous & accurate cover, the feel of the pages (not joking) and the honest, courageous, determined and unwavering depth of content. Freligh's word choices I found to be powerful and surprising. There were so many that I decided not to repeat any because almost each poem carries more than a few. This is a book I read more than once, and I think you should too.

Freligh captures the high-spirit dreams of youth oppressed by the joy-stealing heaviness of life living in the downtrodden working class. I'm taking the speaker of the these connected poems to be biographical.

The structure of the book is like a "concept album" and hold poems of mother/daughter pathos and love, a teenager in a 'home for unwed mothers,' "The Birth Mother" writing to her missing girl, grief, sorrow, sex, smoking, drinking, work, bits of happiness, aging, and ending in a poem that rounds it all up: Wondrous.

Yes, the book is wondrous.

[Connie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, powerful poems, each one a chapter leading to the novella of a life. Not always a happy life, but an examined, introspective one. I love this short collection. My favorite one is the last one, Wondrous, "...we know nothing of loss and its sad math, how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief multiplies the one preceding it..."

[Allison Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freligh is so skilled at writing concise pieces that hit deep. Each poem in this collection has at least one line that made me gasp aloud. Definitely one to come back to often.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Freligh's poems are sometimes brassy, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, often shocking, invariably memorable.

[Jeff Tigchelaar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any poem that starts with "Fuck is everywhere," you're going to keep reading.
Any poet that starts a poem with "Fuck is everywhere," you're going to keep reading.
That's what I did, anyway, and this is what I found with Sarah Freligh in Sad Math, a collection that starts strong and just doesn't even begin to dwindle.
Here. 35 pages in, Freligh drops these lines that I think are some of the best I'll ever read, anywhere. The brutal honesty and (what I trust to be) stark accuracy is astonishing:

The day you were born you felt
like a bowl of hot pasta the doctor
spilled on my stomach. The nurse said
Your baby is beautiful but she was wrong.
You looked like Eisenhower,
and you were never mine

(from "The Birth Mother on Her Daughter's First Birthday")

To take a moment like that of all moments, and to infuse it with that edge, that blade of humor—and in such close proximity to utter heartbreak…is not just stunning. It's devastating. It’s a poet operating at the height of poetry.

[Dan Hendrickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could give this book six stars, I would. This is the real stuff.

[Zina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freligh’s Sad Math is a collection that is as desolate as it is passionate. The poems reveal desires that were satisfied carnally but never truly fulfilled through actual love. Reading many of the middle poems was like seeing a night scape only through the flashes of lightning storm - awesome and brilliant but never enough.

This is not a happy read, but the reason I have this book is for the very last poem, Wondrous, which is one of my favorite modern poems ever written. It is worth all the stars I can give it.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading these wonderful poems, and I love each one of them every time I reread it. I'm committing a few to memory. The poems speak to so much about growing up that never makes it into poetic form--quitting smoking, teenage sex, being groped by your boss, working at crappy jobs where people treat you badly. Sarah Freligh brings so much depth to events like these. The poems make my heart ache.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a lovely collection of emotionally driven and personal poems. I was drawn in by the title poem that brought tears to my eyes and was immediately evocative of my own personal experiences.

Freligh creates wonderful vignettes with her words. I finished the book and wished there'd been more.

[Charity Yost Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freligh is brilliant. Though the subject matter of this book is cohesive, it is also vastly diverse. The speaker grows, changes, learns, and so does the reader. I'll gladly read it all again.

[Kyla]

Fantastic book of poems. The author writes about difficult topics without sentimentalizing or attempting to manipulate the reader's emotions. It's clear, clean, powerful writing at its best.

[Antonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poetry collection is alternatively beautiful and heartbreaking. I laughed and I cried. And I remembered, because the poems recalled settings and emotions from my own early years. But mostly I marveled at Freligh’s poetic skill. The way an ordinary girlhood is taken up so precisely and so tenderly lifts experience from the everyday to the memorable and significant. Someone said that the past recounted in these poems is understandable only when viewed through a rearview mirror. I’ve spent some time looking in that rearview mirror myself. And these poems really resonate. If you can’t find this collection, Freligh has several others available.

Oh one more very cool thing! The last poem in this collection, titled “Wondrous,” was selected to be part of the Lunar Codex, an archive of contemporary art, books, music, poetry, and film launched to the moon. The Odysseus moon lander carried Sarah Freligh’s poem to the moon in late February, 2024.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every. Single. Page.
Every single one is beautifully written. I took many classes with Sarah Freligh while in undergrad, and I know wholeheartedly each word is painstakingly, reverentially placed there with purpose. I loved every second of it, I reread it now and again.

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for Fathers and Mothers – A
Collection
By Sarah Freligh