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Stitches by Sarah Cummins Small

$17.99

Paper

Debut

979-8-89990-061-7

2025

Stitches is a debut collection of 20 poems woven together to explore stories told, retold, or only whispered. It is a visceral contemplation of seasons of life and simple moments: a soldier tracing a well-loved photograph; a father’s familiar hand skewering a slice of apple; a mother’s grief as her son spits “her out like some bitter peel”; the final cry of a long life: “I am done.” Sprinkled throughout the collection are love songs to the natural world—a celebration of spaces where “tongues catch sunflakes” and fireflies explode in “white-hot disco ball frenzy.” This is a world where readers can breathe deeply, where the “soporific potion” of the mountains eases tired souls. We are all invited to “unzip our stiff suits” and rest a while in beneath a canopy of green. With evocative but accessible language and vivid imagery, the poet invites the reader to pause, find a comfortable spot to curl up, and step into a world that will feel a little like coming home. Each poem by itself is a slice of life—a snapshot capturing a single moment. Together, these poems create a “slipshod collage” of intimate but familiar moments stitched together to reveal the expanse of possibility: of lives well lived, of yearning, heartbreak, beauty, and legacy.

 

Sarah Cummins Small lives outside Knoxville, TN.  Her poetry has appeared in Appalachia Bare, Cider Press Review, Tiny Wren Lit, Yalobusha Review, and Willawaw Journal, among others, as well as in the anthologies Breathing the Same Air and Migrants and Stowaways. She holds an MA in English/creative writing from Iowa State University.

 

PRAISE:

 

Pay attention to this amazing poet! Sarah Small has stitched together scraps of what we think we know – about birth, love, parenting, the land, mothers and fathers – into something so earthy, so real, it leaves us marveling at what we have missed in our quilted together lives. Until now.

–Kim Hayes, author of As If She Spoke in Tongues

 

We will never be / so carefully memorized – so Sarah Small begins her collection Stitches, then poem by poem pieces a quilt of memory and legacy, reverence and longing. Its beautiful pattern gradually emerges, on each page so carefully imagined. The poet’s eye and ear, imagery and music, each delicate detail and meticulous observation, lives shared, secrets revealed: these are indeed the stitches that gather us into a single human family.

–Bill Griffin, author of How We All Fly

 

 

 

 

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