KEELING by Sarah Peecher

“The speaker of Keeling asks, ‘What does a fox with a rabbit mean?’. Peecher answers in compelling poetic structures, surveying the struggles of girlhood, spirituality, and sexuality under a mother’s worried eye. How does one soothe a mother? How does one let a mother go? The way I see it after reading Peecher’s debut chapbook is that sometimes you’re the perishing rabbit and sometimes you’re all teeth.”

—–C. M. Burroughs 

Sarah Peecher’s Keeling reimagines personal history through the complex double exposures of memory. Taken together, these poems create a multivocal, controlled-burn of a narrative. In relentlessly innovative poetic forms, the self is continually made and remade as it walks through the flames of individual and social conflagration. “After all the smoke & mirrors, I will finally be honest,” Peecher writes. “I don’t want to be modest. I am a medley & melodious & I will look the part.”

–Tony Trigilio

If “keeling” means turning over on its side, as in a ship capsizing, the poems in Sarah Peecher’s debut chapbook will not be knocked over so easily. In fact, Keeling is the story of a self-made turning over, a young woman’s reinvention of self. With hearts “bounding like an arctic hare,” we follow “a girl at the precipice” on a pivotal journey of wayfinding hard-won through interrogation of religious upbringing and bodily autonomy and the emergence of queer identity. As a poet, Peecher leverages the immensity of small moments, slowing time equally for trauma (a car accident, a drowning) and joy (dancing in a bar). Having once prayed to stay “eternally invisible,” this poet’s got her “stompiest boots on” now, and she’s determining where and by whom she wishes to be seen and heard.

–Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Exploding Head