Sarah Sarai’s Comments

“Front Yard (I Have No Mythology)”
I was making my yearly (or so) grand tour of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, and as such things do, “Front Yard” appeared. Much in this poem is autobiographical—as opposed to other of my work. My grandmother’s death, my father going outside to our front lawn on Long Island when he heard, seven-year-old me taking his hand to comfort him. After he died in the ’80s, he visited me, in a manner of speaking, for two years. It’s a family tradition, for the dead to visit the living. In the ’90s when I moved back to Manhattan, where he grew up, he showed up to accompany me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He loved Goya. I needed the living; he needed peace. Agreements were reached. The poem was published in my collection The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX, 2009).

“Maybe Not So Big,” “Winner Take All,” “In the Lord’s Name”
For a while it seemed like every poem I wrote was the equivalent of a Major Arcana in a Tarot deck, freighted and intense. I opted to elicit a change and these are my suppliation to the muse. (“In the Lord’s Name” was published in my collection, The Future Is Happy. “All Things Are Things” was published in Thirteen Myna Birds, 2009.)

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