Description
We spend most of our lives skating across surfaces, seldom stopping to think about the underpinnings and background stories that brought us to the current moment and place. Jane Sasser’s What’s Underneath explores the ways in which we are grounded by memory and the physical world, our own beginnings and heritage. Whether remembering a childhood on a farm or reflecting on the present time, the poems consider how we are haunted by experiences we cannot change. The collection ends facing the future with an homage to beloved dogs, the steady devotion that waits for us at the end of each day, enriching our lives and growing new roots.
Praise for What’s Underneath
What’s Underneath is a world well worth exploring, a world of chickens in a graveyard whose “crowing ensures there will be unquiet slumber for the sleepers in [the] quiet earth”; or a mother who threatened to haunt, and the speaker who wishes she had so there would be “one kind face in a chaos of loss.” It is a world where humor slips up on the reader, as in “Love Poem” where the beloved “grades on a curve,” or in “How It Ends” when we discover that what seemed tragic might not be so bad at all. In Jane Sasser’s What’s Underneath, the reader journeys through the ordinary moments of daily life, guided by a poet who wields language like a spotlight illuminating what otherwise might have gone unnoticed.
—Connie Jordan Green,
author of Darwin’s Breath
In these elegiac poems, Jane Sasser marks off the times that deepen, sweeten, and darken our lives. And though we may stumble over what’s underneath and what haunts us, there’s always the September blue of what grounds and loves us. There’s always that glowing hour of memory held wrenlike in hand and heart. Frost may have written, “Nothing gold can stay,” but this beautiful work belies the autumnal in its “euphoria of dogs,” all of us, whether missing or missed, being counted and accounted for “in the loved pack.”
—Linda Parsons,
author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth
