Dear Outsiders: poems

by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

Set in a small tourist town, two siblings attempt to navigate and survive an unfamiliar landscape after their parents' deaths while trying to simultaneously forget and remember them. Dear Outsiders  explores how we are part of and stranger to our environments and to our families and how identities form by where and who we come from. The collection is a map of isolation and longing and of what it means to be deserted and alive.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

Published March 7, 2023

About the author

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of Paper Cotton Leather, Malak, and Dear Outsiders and the co-author of Book of Levitations. Her prose has appeared in The Rumpus, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, and others. She co-founded Josephine Quarterly and teaches creative writing at Kennesaw State University.

Reviews

[Ebony (EKG)]

divided into two sections, these prose poems follow siblings growing up in a tourist beach town. their parents die by drowning, and in the second half of this collection, they are relocated to a land/forested area that seems foreign and mystical and a way for them to explore the trauma of their parents passing away.

i really loved the beach setting, especially now that summer is coming to an end. these prose poems had beautiful moments of realization and romanticism.

[Claire Matturro · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Dear Outsiders" is a vibrant tale of childhood, written with lyrical phrases within a series of interlinked short prose poems. These are well-written, fine-tuned, evocative, and completely compelling poems which deserve a wide audience. The imagery is singularly sensuous and the themes of grief, being an outsider in one’s own homeplace, and finding a kind of peace/resolution in memory are profound and haunting. This is, in short, a stunning collection of prose poems.

Using the plural first person narrative voice of two siblings with frequent use of “our” and “we” adds a personal feel and a directness to the poems. These are not aloof poems, but rather ones in which the poet immerses the readers directly into the siblings’ whole, rich universe of color, taste, feel, sight, and sound.

With the technique of using the plural first person, the poet also convincingly conveys the closeness of the two siblings, with a hint of “us against the world.” In “Outlines,” for example, “we come out with our hands open, grabbing at / nothing. And, when this house drowns, we’ll be failed sailors.”

While there is a discernable story arc that moves through the poems with the natural flow of a narrative, the emotions, perceptions, and images are the far more compelling aspects rather than plot.

Within "Dear Outsiders," very precise, striking and creative metaphors and similes abound in the poems. In “Signs of Water” a seagull is a “sand dollar beating on the sky.” In “Decoys,” after running up the “tourist trap” lighthouse, “Our lungs are open clams.” In the aftermath of a storm in “Land Survey” the siblings observe “Our street is a line of branches cleaved by weather.”

Richly imaginative, glorious in the evocative use of all the senses, and with its stunning lyrical phrases, this collection is going to invite its readers back again and again to read, reread, savor.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

These quirky prose poems contain fragments of “what’s left of what’s dead”: the flotsam and jetsam of memories, like a family album of snapshots or collection of prized beach-combing treasures, with artful titles that frame each piece with startling ingenuity.

“And we had a dog who was so sick that she was always dying, and our saving was to feed her all her favorite foods and then tell the animal doctor to put her asleep. We didn’t ask for her body back. What’s left of what’s dead. Her toys. Her hairs on the couch. More than we could stuff in our pockets.” —from “Healing Response,” p. 52


Favorite Poems:
“Topographies”
“When We Are So Young”
“Tragedy Lesson”
“Forgiveness Toll”
“Land Stories”
“At Our Lessons We’re Given a Map”
“A Field, A Flood”
“Healing Response”
“Growing Our Own Doctor”
“Throw Ring”
“Land Survey”

[t. · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was a really exciting find in a local little free library! so many of these poems were ultra beautiful

[Anna Reeve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. Cinematic. Bildungsroman. Relentless.