Soft Focus

by Sarah Jean Grimm

Light is louche and love is not a natural beauty in Sarah Jean Grimm’s disarming and ethereal debut collection of poetry. Soft Focus glares at subjects like internet culture, bodies, beauty products, and American exceptionalism, laying their contents bare. Grimm’s poems lift the veil of femininity and the result is brilliant and raw. A true journey through the psychic landscape of today’s fixations and phobias.

Genres: Poetry

66 pages, Paperback

First published March 25, 2017

Reviews

[Emily]

"And you should understand
In knowing what I want
I already have what I want"
-Cool Blue Middles

This collection really picked up for me in the second half, where all of my favorites were:

-Nagl ("One way to spoil the present is to write it down")
-Partial Theories On ("This body / and that body will be new / bodies in a decade every atom / replaced and unremembering")
-Crystal Palace ("This morning I invented / a future which any day now / I will enter")

[Guillaume Morissette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really liked this collection, also makes a good secret gift to impress a special someone you like.

[Lara · Rating 4 out of 5]

💗

"My gut reaction when I am in the world
Is to apologize
No one's ever said sorry to me
For making my eyelashes stick together"

"when I am close to you
I am closer to everything
a real citizen of the universe
...
there must be ten thousand touches
inside your touch
like that
right there"

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems felt like light with hints of darkness, never enough to change the tone of the book, the cover is pretty spot on. It was the perfect book to read in the sunlight on what began as a cold day. This line of the title poem is true of life, especially our modern one with social media: I find myself sometimes existing in sections / I can't seem to pick a face and stick with it.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

In knowing what I want/ I already have what I want

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is alive with energy that radiates outward through the speakers' every emotion and thought. Uncomfortable, yearning, content, confident, violent—the mode and tone keeps transforming but the energy stays locked in the poem's core throughout this collection. Grimm also is a master of the off-hand remark as poetic device; some of the most impactful lines and images are delivered in a casual or even disinterested tone that, by virtue of this tone, sneak under the reader's guard and implant in their conscious, to keep echoing. This is a beautiful, tense book of poems.