Reviews "That first there is that orchestration of rhythm and its implicative meanings: irresolution, attentiveness, mensuration. But each remedy generates a new symptom, and the words, like quills, pierce the frames of their contexts. I and You, objects and events, the personal and the scientific shed their discretion and are irrevocably intertwined: 'My back opens' and what she encounters, at once horrific and eerily intimate, is 'Your hand around my spine.'" "The Work of Days is a collection of poems that are as captivating and confusing as emotions, dreams or hallucinations. . . . Each poem seems to hang together with the others in a delicate web, circling and tangled around one another like our memories, conversations and feelings often do in our minds. . . . These poems are beautiful, fragile and haunting, both joyous and sad for the necessary work of living, sharing and feeling anything and everything." —Nancy Duncan from Broken Pencil. A feature in Sharkforum, by Simone Muenuch Feature in E Y E W E A R, by Todd Swiff. "At her best, Lang's disjunctive syntax and taut, oblique episodes can be hauntingly moving." "In her debut poetry collection . . . Sarah Lang riffs on concepts as meta as romantic love and as minute as a liter of diet Coke. . . . Lang toys with sentence structure and vocabulary to yield an abstract, yet emotive, volume of work." "Lang demonstrates . . . a devilishly clever ability to use the sentence within the poetic line to devastating emotional effect . . . . setting up witty and strangely tender connections, an aura of awkward sadness the speaker cannot, for all her intelligence and wit, escape." —poet Douglas Barbour in the Edmonton Journal. 12 or 20 Questions Interview Feature and Interview from the Edmonton Journal "The Work of Days is a psychological portrait . . . . and the engagement it provides is that of following the convolutions of a thought." Sarah's "[reading of the mind] is of necessity going to be an insurgent one . . . . That alone is worth the price of admission, I think. Sarah's certainly not alone in writing out of, instead of about, emotion. But I think she is unique in doing so in such a sustained, uncompromising, fashion. Woolf was not the first to make her characters conscious, but she was the first to let them remain so. I think it's the case that Sarah is doing something as radical, and important, as that." —Simon DeDeo at Rhubarb is Susan "With ferocity and tenderness, direction and indirection, with and without hope these staggering poems astonish at every turn. One gets up from them changed." "This is a poetry of mounting and surmounting light . . . .What I admire about this book is the smallness, the closeness, the precision. Constructed far more by scalpel than out of bare bone, Lang’s poem cuts down beyond the heart of the matter and into the essence itself of the heart. This is an enviable poetry, an enviable poem." "There are a number of things poetry can do to engage the reader. It can be emotionally stimulating through wit, shared sorrow or illuminating realisations. The message can be complex, inviting a second look to find what else is there. A visual poem, easily understood, can provide an immediate connection between the reader and the text. It doesn’t need to be deep, but it needs to be interesting . . . . Although there is recurrence in Lang’s first book (the colour red predominates, for example), there isn’t a lot of cohesion. The reader isn’t left with a sense of why or how the perspective of the narrator evolves throughout what seems to be a story, or at least a record of time passing." —Brenna Kapman, "a young hippie spoken word anarchist"at Vue Weekly |