We

by Sarah Freligh

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis; A Brief Natural History of an American Girl (Accents Publishing, 2012); and Sort of Gone (Turning Point Books, 2008). Recent work has been featured on Writer’s Almanac, appeared in the Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Diode, and in the anthologies New Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018) and Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020. Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006. She lives and swims in Rochester, New York.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Fiction

29 pages, Paperback

Published January 15, 2021

Reviews

[Alicia Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way Freligh uses language is electric, palpable, juicy. This is a slim book, but a heavy-weight; it leaves an indelible impression.

[Cindie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another beautifully written book by Sarah Freligh. It’s a snapshot into the past, filled with interesting and surprising moments.

[Renée Roehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah Freligh loves to muck around in her past digging for the jewels of joy, grief & growth from the telescopic lens of latter in life. I'm so happy to have found her work with SAD MATH and this lovely chapbook doesn't disappoint.

The micro twists of word choice and line breaks really get into the universal 'knowing' of existence and the existential loneliness as well. Yet there's still a brilliant joy and the wild side exploration.

I love her rich wordings that paint the scenes, muscular verbs and line breaks that extend into the ether before the next line hits. From the first poem, "Ann Arbor 1974":

"Sky bruising purple when I stuck out
my thumb and caught a fast ride
west in an spoke-wheeled Cadillac
with three geezers who passed

a silver flask of Scotch, honeyed
with age, and even I sang along..."



"...I played pinball for hours
at the Greyhound station, high

on horsepower and whiskey,
an eternity before the bus
chuffed in. How is it that time
is slow and heavy as an elephant

when you're young and impatient to get
to the next second?..."

If you've not discovered Freligh yet, get to it.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tiny but amazing! Some pieces are flash, some are poetry, and some are harder to classify, but none of them will leave you unmoved.

[Allison Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is an amazing study of how you can say so much—and make the reader feel so much—in so few words. I can’t stop repeating, “but no, you can go crazy that way, believing you are goddess enough to make shit happen.” Definitely one to re-read any time I want to remember how to deftly use language in micros and flash.

[Steven Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last piece in Sarah Freligh’s book is titled “What We Remember.” You will certainly remember the “holy roller girl.” The girl “who stuffed a transistor radio down her pants while her pastor daddy handed out salvation in front of Sears.” In other pieces you will remember “Olga” who “was fast as a muscle car, one of those girls.” And you will remember “it’s like you / go out a girl who can honky tonk / all night” and will eventually return “home old, smelling / of spiced apples and cat, fat / with memories coding your bones.” And you will remember hanging out with the girls in “We Dive” as they “learn about calories and fat from the high school girls” as they “pick at burgers without buns, drink cans of Tab poured warm over ice that cracks like knuckles.” And you will remember the “hoodie girl” when she has you “sit down on a toilet seat and paint[s] you up into somebody else. Somebody who’d look good riding shotgun, bourbon-breathed, arm cocked on an open window.” You will remember the word “because” in a different context after you read “Babies, Because.” You will remember the lock of blonde “hair coiled inside the folded bills of her wallet” after you read “A Kind of Magic.” In “Letter to a Friend in May,” the speaker states, “I know time heals what wounds us, but try / to tell me in January that winter will end. / That under a foot of snow a seed can grow.” Well, you will certainly remember that the pieces in this magnificent short collection are seeds that will continue to grow as you read and reread them—even if buried under an avalanche of snow.

[Kristiane Weeks-Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah Freligh’s We (Harbor Editions, 2021) is dedicated to, “All the girls, everywhere,” yet the registers of identification also shift between I, you, and we. Moments are marked by cultural brands such as Tab, and by location cues, as in the first poem “Ann Arbor, 1974” where the speaker hitchhikes “all the way to South Bend.” These moments clue readers in: “Who are we?” Midwest-experienced Americans.

Common themes in this collection are feminine: motherhood, the cost of beauty, sexuality. “We Dive” explores six years, beginning with, “Age 12, we dive and dive,” then quickly skipping to, “18, [where] we arrange chaise lounges and serve up the buffet of ourselves.” From the perspective of an older, wiser observer the speaker examines how girls are turned into sex objects.

Never explicitly defined, the time period is identifiable as one when women’s bodies are not their own, controlled by outside forces. “Babies, Because” recognizes how girls are not given adequate sex education or many choices for birth control, so pregnancies occur, “because the rubber broke while hot and heavy in the backseat of the drive-in, because ginger-ale was an old wives’ tale.”
The poem “Those Girls” is the gravity point of We, holding readers with five simple sentences ending in consequence: “Olga was fast as a muscle car, one of those girls. There on Friday, gone by Monday to care for a sick aunt in Florida. We knew better. We knew she’d be back in nine months, flattened, her brass tarnished. Smudged with the fingerprints of all who had driven her.” This compact poem compounds the social negativity already associated with reproduction. Without self-identification Olga comes back marked, “tarnished . . . smudged.” The form of the poem adds to its conversational feel. It’s a story being shared between community members, a hushed code. From this coming-of-age tapestry arises a biting social commentary.

Here are images of people hollowed out in various ways—purging, abortion—coming back “a ghost girl, rinsed of all but the hard, high notes.”

review published on harbor-review.com

[Julie Capell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent set of poems embedded in what it has meant to be a girl and a woman in the US over the past 60 years. Themes include the craziness of youth, the suddenness of getting old ("Ann Arbor, 1974," "Babies, Because"), mass shootings, life and death. Nice how some of her titles lead you to think the poem will be about one thing but then turn out to be about something else ("Epidemic," "We Dive"). Drinking Tab and using baby oil to get a better tan (we must be about the same age, because I remember that and nobody does that anymore). Many of the pieces in this collection are closer to flash fiction than poetry, not that there's anything wrong with that. Loved this book!