The Ghost Assembly Line

by Sarah M. Sala

Sarah Sala's collection is full of sly and beautiful poems. Startling and exploratory, her voice is completely unique, and her vision blazes in every line. This is important new poetry by a poet of genuine talent. -Laura Kasischke THE GHOST ASSEMBLY LINE does a lot in just a few poems. I love how present the past is in this collection - family history, a city's history, and the small painful moments from a life are celebrated alongside quotidian concerns, or a lover's body. Intimate and public spaces fill this collection and the effect is dizzying in the best way. It reminds us that poems are the place where everything happens at once. -Matthew Rohrer Sarah Sala's work goes beyond our everyday use of a word like catharsis to its older definition, a purgation. It is urgent, and yet, in the many faces of violation here, there is a voice that wants to make us safe, and it does this by presenting America with its own broken surface. These poems burst from the seed of Yeats's terrible beauty. They brandish themselves on blank space, praise what negation does to desire, and shiver gorgeously with rare kindness. In their gleam, we see splendor, outrage, and "a torrential downpour into nothingness. -Natalie Eilbert

Genres: Poetry

30 pages, Paperback

Published May 8, 2016

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sarah Sala takes on a lot in the thirteen short poems of her chapbook, from the Detroit water crisis to the tragedy in Charleston to the generosity that fills an ex-lover's heart years after a relationship ends. Altogether, for me, these lyrics coalesced around questions of how we approach the gross injustices in our world--what fills our wellsprings of compassion? who has the privilege of loving without fear? how do we guard against our sympathies and attention being twisted away from those who hurt? how do we learn to accept difference as benign while staying alert to real dangers?

The questions--themselves a kind of assembly line--float above more concrete joys in the reading: "the pour/ of refrigerator light/ from the moon"; "a jolly clam/ of teeth swam beside/ us in a jar"; "the tar-green tenderness/ in your eyes." "Your spalted grooves" sent me happily to the dictionary.

My favorite poem, the eerie "Blue Dog Blue Dog," describes the haunting visit of a costumed and masked stranger to a community college classroom. It remains unexplained but tinged with menace and the potential for violence.

A fine debut I recommend particularly to folks with ties to Michigan.