Poetry. "Sarah White's CLEOPATRA HAUNTS THE HUDSON is an eloquently moving recherche du temps perdu. History is a treasury of ghostly personages whom White brings back and vivifies for us, usually to tell the stories of their losses—Cleopatra, Keats, Molière, Anne Frank, and many lesser known. Families and love affairs also bequeath haunted elegies. But memory is fragile. Poems that call out to the dead or missing are broken by contrary winds. Indeed, some of the very poetic forms that White deploys in her recollections are assailed by disuse—sestina, villanelle, sonnet-so that many poems must turn upon themselves, examine their own ability to hold the right words fast, must argue with themselves about rhyme and cadence"—Eugene K. Garber.

Author Hometown: NEW YORK, NY USA



About the author: Before moving to Manhattan, Sarah White taught French language and literature at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA. She is author of a poetry collections ALICE AGES AND AGES (BlazeVOX Books, 2010) and CLEOPATRA HAUNTS THE HUDSON (Spuyten Duyvil, 2007), a poetry chapbook, Mrs. Bliss and the Paper Spouses (Pudding House, 2007), and a book-length lyric essay, The Poem Has Reasons: a Story of Far Love (Proem Press, 2008). She is also co-translator (with Matilda Bruckner and Laurie Shepard) of Songs of the Women Troubadours (Routledge, 2000).

Reviews:
Komo Ananda @ Coldfront