Sarah Jefferis – Publications, Novels, Poetry

Publications

What Enters The Mouth

By Sarah Jefferis

These are fearless poems–a reckoning of the violences of girlhood rendered with grit and clarity. What Enters the Mouth is a brave collection that wrestles with loss and pain, and strides beautifully into a power and wildness of womanhood that refuses to be contained.

– Ansel Elkins , author of Blue Yodel , winner of the 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition

Sarah Jefferis is an inventor, a truth teller, a fabricator, a witness. Like Dickinson, she dwells in possibilities. She constructs alternate lives [“I could have been my sister...my mother” or “My other body is the sea.”]. She’s “the other in the room.” If these stances seem contradictory, they are in the service of the deep mysteries of surviving and desiring. This book has a licked clean, all in, unreasonable, unafraid, incendiary, vulnerable and startling reckoning I admire.

– Bruce Smith , author of The Other Lover and Devotions

At times tender, at times raging, at times both, the poetry of Sarah Jefferis speaks to that which polite society, particularly the polite society of the South, prefers to ignore or demean as unspeakable. Here is a poetry of hunger and the strength to bear it, of love and the courage to live it, of wisdom and the vigilance to question it. Brave is too small a word. A skillful writer, Jefferis has gifted us a beautiful collection crafted with intelligence, wit, and transcendent hope.

– Jose A. Rodriguez , author of House Built on Ashes: A Memoir , and The Shallow End of Sleep

Standing Stone Books

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Forgetting the Salt

By Sarah Jefferis

In Forgetting the Salt origins meet with exhumations that wring from them their vital truths. In these poems, to remember is to want to forget, and tensions between formal and free verse define a line the poet walks from bondage to escape and expression. The nuclear family-severed-sets the stage for the human family's failings on a larger scale, yet there are redemptions of connection, of the telling itself. The last lines of these poems ring like clear bells.

– Cathryn Hankla Hollins University Professor

Forgetting the Salt is an astonishing collection of poems, packed with love and fury, irony and humor. Tough, urgent, surprising, these poems are both necessary and comforting.

– Maria Mazziotti Gillan Director of Creative Writing at SUNY Binghamton

Sarah Jefferis's poems in Forgetting the Salt combine dazzling metaphor with an undiminishable lyricism; here is a twenty-first century Romantic worthy of the calling. In her poems, one encounters a mind that dallies with the surreal, and yet always returns to terra firma. Like the poet Ai with whom she shares much, Jefferis's poems sparkle with their odd associations and radical suffusions--in one marvelous poem, a pyromaniac "harvests the sweet flames" as all is engulfed. In another lyric, we contemplate the gestation period of an elephant, finding in its protracted struggle our own rude calculus. Jefferis, thank goodness, astonishes as she delights; and yet, and always, there is a wise woman-centered sassy spirit. If she has traveled far from the church, she is never far from revelation. This is a stunning collection of poems--smart, elegant, and yes, fiery.

– Kenneth A. McClane W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Literature, Cornell University

Foothills Publishing

Labor Day

Contributed to by Sarah Jefferis

Labor Day belongs on the nightstand next to What to Expect When You're Expecting. It's a must-have book for mothers, mothers-to-be, and anyone who cares about what birth looks like today.'

In Labor Day, you'll read about women determined to give birth naturally and others begging for epidurals; women who pushed for hours and women whose labors were over practically before they'd started; women giving birth to twins and to ten-pound babies.

These women give birth in the hospital, at home, in bathtubs, and, yes, even in the car. Some revel in labor, some fear labor, some feel defeated by labor, some are fulfilled by it―and all are amazed by it.

You will laugh, weep, squirm, perhaps groan in recognition, and undoubtedly gasp with surprise. And then you'll call every mother or mother-to-be that you know and say "You MUST read Labor Day."