Bandit Letters

by Sarah Messer

Sarah Messer’s Bandit Letters are an archive of against coherence and for multiplicity. Her cast of elusive outlaws, who encounter the borders and borderlands of experience and identity, appear, reappear, and disappear in landscapes that conjure the Wild West, Colonial New England, and a pop-culture-strewn American present tense.

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book of poetry. Wild west and transgender themes throughout.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

...After wildfire, the storm, Hiroshima,
black bodies stacked hospital hallways, and fell naked
in the streets like the limbs of trees, clothes singed
off backs by one moment's brilliance: Atomic-Sun.
One mother found her daughter's face
covered by a stranger's kerchief, and was grateful

for a screen to project memories upon: green
landscapes, young children, the swing-beam of light
catching dust motes, the reason why

I walk into desperation sometimes,
into the field's ground-zero---for stone,
or twig, of kerchief rising like a flag over

memory--- to remember you, a face
that I now recognize, walking out
of the burned landscape--- she is not a man,

she is a woman, young, barely fourteen;
she has stared at the exploding sky too long,
and been consumed by everything.


-from "After wildfire,"

[Christopher Heaney · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives...

[Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the name of disclosure, Sarah Messer was a professor of mine at UNCW.

[Anne Sanow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interestingly historically inspired; the long central prose poem, "I am the real Jesse James," is a lyric standout.