Winged by Sarah Grieve

The first poem in Winged takes you from a dive hotel near LAX to anywhere you want to go with stops for meditations on language and love, and that is only the beginning of this gorgeous book. Nothing is not marvelous to Grieve—potato chips, bikinis, family photos, wrestling, sports. Associating like Botticelli’s Simonetta on amphetamines, she begs Dr. Frankenstein to make her but with Liz Taylor’s eyes. Mae West is Grieve’s muse, but so are Italy and “the spilt wine of sundown,” and a man gunned down in a BART station, because “we’re all conspirators in Death’s master plot,” standing with Calamity Jane at Wild Bill’s grave, telling it like it is. This book is magic.

–Barbara Hamby

The crystalline poetry in Sarah Grieve’s exquisite debut volume, Winged, lifts off the page electric.  Sculpted, full of lilt and swerve, these poems balance the jaunty wistfulness of a strong woman’s single life with her worldly curiosity and quest for self-invention.  In a brilliant apostrophe to Botticelli’s muse, to give one example, the speaker asserts that (unlike Simonetta) she’ll consume the “deep pulls of oil, sweeps of paint” in order to “create myself in the flesh.”  Grieve’s impassioned vision is grounded by earthy humor and incandescent smarts, but as this dazzling volume unfurls, these poems take wing.

—Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth

Car motors rev in these poems, beds are made and unmade, glasses emptied and filled again…reader, if I told you everything these busy, happy poems do, we’d be here all day.  Sarah Grieve’s world is the same as yours and mine, yet it’s also an enchanted realm in which anything can happen, where a pretty girl sharing a bag of chips with a homeless guy on a park bench is the star of her own movie. The show’s about to start, and you won’t want to miss a minute, so find your seat, sit back, and get ready to burn some calories.

–David Kirby