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Two Signatures
Sara Ellen Fowler (Author)
9781647691868
Paperback / softback, published 24 June 2024
88 pages
27.9 x 21.6 x 2 cm, 0.454 kg
“Declaring to 'believe in the horizon only,' Sara Ellen Fowler in this extraordinary debut continually looks outward, looks at the spaces in between--the spaces both perceived and beyond our grasp. In stunning lyrics that are both eclogue and elegy, that are built from barrel races, FFA jackets, and brushfires leaping the lanes of freeway, Fowler engages a poetics of natural and supernatural means. But 'could language be altar enough'? Working in portraiture, in plein air, in ekphrasis, Fowler finds solace somewhere between the visual and the verbal, finds sustenance and beauty--poem after gorgeous poem--within attentive and exquisite forms where even the horse’s hoof holds the 'private archive of the ride.'” - Brandon Som, author of Tripas
“In language carried on air, in the cellular material of generations, each poem in Two Signatures traces its source invisibly across the spine of another. The poems work inside the body with an explicit sensual, grave, and rare haunting. They settle inside first like a bridge from one life to the next but soon as a fractured web of one life to the many and the many to the impossible count. The poems piece back from their hard light the scattered, the unspooled, the untethered and the strange, taking incident and moment into a terrible, godly reunion.” - Asher Hartman, artist and theater maker
“The images and questions presented in Two Signatures will haunt you in the best way. Fowler is a genius at articulating the mysterious experience of being a body among other bodies--what it means to touch, to be touched, to be pulled apart by the world around us. These poems challenge the borders and boundaries of language, invoking moments of transcendence in vignettes of horses, fields, and lovers. This collection speaks in a voice both idiosyncratic and beautiful as we witness the interior landscapes of a curious and longing mind unfold before us.” - Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, author of I Don't Want to Be Understood
“Internal severance certainly compels these staggering poems to the page, yet this book is no mirror. Sara Ellen Fowler’s insight arrives from other worlds fraught with schism: Eros both fuses and flees. Art might guide or banish you. Some endings that hold were mistakes. Far from a book of despair, Two Signatures gathers wisdom from paradox, gathers in both body and mind a yes to the pained hope that 'One cannot be made whole the same way twice.'” - Katie Ford, author of If You Have to Go
“Sara Ellen Fowler’s debut collection, Two Signatures, sculpts a private language from the exquisite heat of longing and bewilderment. 'I am listening with my skin for her,' Fowler writes, and later commands, 'Hurt me / like this: let me // know your teeth as dearly as / I study my mother.' Allied with Dickinson’s measure of knowing, Fowler’s lyrics alter my temperature, like physical touch, culminating in a sensual decapitation. Yes, as Fowler writes, 'love has taken us down / word for word.' Yes, this book is a gift of intimacy and transformation made tangible in its reaching. An extraordinary debut--highly recommended.” - Allison Benis White, author of Please Bury Me in This
In Two Signatures, Sara Ellen Fowler initiates her readers into a synesthetic contract of close attention and deep feeling. From the wood floor of an art museum buckling with Lake Michigan moisture, to the mud-packed hooves of the horse of childhood, to an art student’s spit on a pane of mirrored glass, the poems’ images string together a necklace of exquisite longing. Pleasures and complexities of sensory experience lay the ground for a world where risk is rewarded and candor is sensual. The poet explores registers of desire and power, drawing upon her training as a visual artist to make a studio of language. Temperature and texture gain grammar as the poems reach toward awe via multivalent psychology, sex, and sculptural interventions. These poems invite readers to explore the vulnerability and insistence that mark one’s devotion to any creative practice.
OLD BOND
s thirtieth birthday, 1962
s loose skin