Like the Oppen she takes as her epigraph, Sasha Steensen's is a poetry
that feels magically made via both subtraction and building. With
language as lush as Hopkins' and then as small and weird as Niedecker's,
Steensen tells a story, or alights in and out of a story, all her own.
It's an American story, too, with all the bloodiness and experiment that
such a thing requires.--Maggie Nelson
Sasha Steensen's third volume is a lyric inquiry into a personal history
of the back-to-the-land idealism of the 1970s, with its promises and
failings, naturalism gone awry, and journeys into the worlds of
addiction, recovery, and, ultimately, family. If family is a body, learn
its anatomy, Steensen writes early in the book, immediately before
upending all our expectations and giving us new thoughts to think.
The family bought a rural plot & planted a garden.
The family formed thoughts.
Within these thoughts, eggs hatched, animals were born, little wars
formed. Each thought said unspeakable things to the other thoughts.
As you know, unspoken thoughts rot.
Sasha Steensen teaches poetry workshops, literature courses,
letterpress printing, and bookmaking at Colorado State University. She
is the author of The Method (2008) and A Magic Book (Alberta Prize,
2004), and chapbooks including A History of the Human Family (2010),
The Future of an Illusion (2008), and correspondence (with Gordon
Hadfield, 2004). Steensen is also co-editor of Bonfire Press, and she
serves as one of the poetry editors for Colorado Review.
