Don't Drink Poison

Author: Sarah Anne Wallen

Publisher: United Artists Books (2015)

"In Don't Drink Poison, a knockout first collection, Sarah Anne Wallen writes, "I'm one big sun of a solar system / a real cunt / fountain of motherlove / full of sounds like / declarative statement" ("Watch Your Eyes (Herstory"). Through a sly directness that seems inspired by Williams, the New York School, Sylvia Plath, and Ariana Reines, Wallen crafts a punk female poetics located in the weird slippery surface of tone. Compressed, smart and raucous, the poems shimmer as they turn language back on its strange self."

—Karen Weiser

"Within precise line lengths, Sarah Anne Wallen finds the music of uneven experience, erasing the false hierarchy between "song" and "speech" with poetry that speaks/sings, harshly, beautifully, from the page. Her "great honesty" may get her into "real trouble," but it's the sort of necessary trouble that stirs up language into something that may actually be "part of and apart from everything." May all your doses of her work be wild."

—Marcella Durand