Meat and Bone

by Sandra Feen

"The poems within Sandra Feen's Meat and Bone offer an emotionally impactful and brutally honest personal portrayal of the beginning, middle, and end of a short romantic relationship, that quickly shifted from marriage to separation to divorce, as wll as the emotional and mental in-betweens and the attempts to understand the details of what broke it into pieces. Sometimes very sad, sometimes unsettling, occasionally darkly humorous, always uniquely well-written, these story-like poems explore the quick excitement of a new romantic experience, quickly followed by embarrassment, disappointment, and pain as it dissolves shortly after it started."

- Juliet Cook, author of Another Set of Ripped-Out Bloody Pigtails

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2019

About the author

Sandra Feen was the Ohio Beat Poet Laureate from 2022–2024. She is a former associate editor of Pudding Magazine, and currently works as an independent poetry and urban fiction editor. A member of the poetry troupe Concrete Wink, she has also been a featured reader in and out of Ohio. She has a BFA in Creative Writing and a BS in English Education from Bowling Green State University, and an MA in Literature from Wright State University. She was one of twelve teachers selected for the National Endowment of the Arts' first "Change Course" program, through W.S.U.'s Institute on Writing and Its Teaching. Publications include in Poetry Motel, Elastic Ekphrastic, and The Pudding House Gang. Her work has been commissioned as part of Thin Places: Poetry and Art Exhibits and Installations at Columbus, Ohio's Jung Haus, and for the Cap City Poets: Columbus and Central Ohio's Best Known, Read, and Requested Poets anthology. She lives in Grove City, Ohio.

Reviews

[Cat Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meat and Bone by Sandra Feen is a deeply personal volume of her narrative poetry, filled with perfect words of courtship, marriage, divorce, and estrangement. I was moved by her portrayal of the dissolution of a love that was supposed to last a lifetime, of the callousness of others, of the unjust judgments of strangers, and finally the tale of the only closure possible for this doomed love affair.

She has a knack for picking perfect moments as metaphor, such as the poem about the luggage lost during their vacation together, "Lost Suitcase":

Who might be more curious--someone opening a treasure chest
from the other side of the world,

or we, finding abandoned love on our doorsteps?
Maybe the suitcase still wanders, a vagabond, its lock
suffocating old promise

just like a firefly caught in a clear plastic container.
The next morning the light, gone.


A beautifully written book.