Sacred Summer

by Cassandra Clarke

In the empty halls of a house on the edge of the woods, a dancer faces the aftermath of a career-ending injury and subsequent divorce.

Twenty years earlier, on the land where her house would be built, two boys died violently and mysteriously while recording a music video for their band, leaving one survivor.Something sleeps in the woods beyond the house, and when the dancer finds the last musician, it will start to wake…

From Rhysling Award finalist Cassandra Rose Clarke comes a visceral examination of dance, music, and obsession told entirely in verse.

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 20, 2020

About the author

Cassandra Clarke graduated in 2006 from The University of St. Thomas with a bachelor's degree in English, and in 2008 she completed her master's degree in creative writing from The University of Texas at Austin.

She is currently living in Houston, Texas and is teaching English at the Lone Star College.

Reviews

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed some other work from this series, so I had high hopes for this one. And I did love the idea of the story, and many of the images. In a lot of the poems, though, this work felt more like a undeveloped prose work that had been split up into poems, versus poems that actually felt like poems. I love poetry, and I love prose, but poetry isn't just prose broken up into many lines, and that's too often what seemed to be happening here. I'd be curious to read some of the author's fiction, but I don't think I'd pick up another of her poetic works. The form too often felt more like a distraction or an excuse for vague brevity here, and I'm afraid I just didn't end up enjoying the work at all as a result.