Spread Thick by Sara Triana

“The taqueria around the corner, the compost bin, and the garden’s milkweed, hosta, and honeysuckle make up the limited but luscious landscape of Sara Triana‘s Spread Thick. At once a record of life in the midst of a global pandemic as well as a meditation on what it means to live in a world that is newly uncertain in other ways, Triana’s rich poems invite readers into questions of motherhood, identity, and the places we look to for salvation when the world is on fire. There is a boldness in these poems, an assertiveness, the compelling voice of a speaker who has started embrace her own wrestling, her own wanting. A voice that shows us that there may be a way to make it through the kind of world we’d hoped to never experience: not a contrived, silver-lining optimism, but a refusal to look away from tragedy while holding one’s arms open to anything lush, abundant, or spread thick.”

–Cherie Nelson, Editor of The Waking and essayist

“In Spread Thick, Sara Triana elegantly navigates the domestic and the numinous, her terror and joy, giving readers a narrator who finds beauty in the mundane while maintaining an almost invisible rage that lingers just below the surface. Her poems pulse with life—indelible, messy, beautiful.”

–Cameron Dezen Hammon, author of THIS IS MY BODY, winner of the Writers’ League of Texas 2019 Discovery Prize in Nonfiction