Another Bastard Peace
poems by
Sarah Elkins
~88 pages, $15 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: April 2027
The Advance Sale Discount price on this books is $9. For those who prefer to pay by check, the discount price is $13.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. Both advance sale prices will expire once the book is sent to press.
PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.
These acutely observed, bracingly honest poems grapple with the fraught threads of history and heritage that run through all of us, traces that are written into our skin by time and lineage, that reside – quite literally – in our bones. Elkins captures vividly what it’s like to be alive right now, in the glorious imperfection of an animal body, trying to live and love and raise children in the ruin, the wonder, the all of it. ~Michael Bazzett
These poems are attuned to the immediacy of West Virginia’s nature; they weave between frayed edges of the past and what’s coming. Compassionate imagination easily shifts from the severe and troubling to the mystical—everything breathes beneath the surface with implication. Predation, Viking invasion, unsettled man-woman drama, paternal anger, and gentle motherhood. Wild and physical, the poems offer communion with the unknowable. Elkins is entirely herself and allows translation from the Mother Language into English. ~Sean Singer
With breathtaking clarity and precision, Elkins has crafted a stunning collection in which a legacy of inherited violence is stretched apart and mapped onto so many interfacing surfaces: childhood, raising a son, encroachment, appropriation, and the often-exploited Appalachian ecosystem in which she was raised. But like the brightest poets, Elkins also gives us poems in which love, redemption, and even escape are possible. Another Bastard Peace is, ultimately, a gritty, tender, often uneasy, always resplendent read. ~Allisa Cherry, author of An Exodus of Sparks (Michigan State University Press)
Body English
Another ten people are dead,
this time at a grocery store.
I’m out of eggs
and so many other things.
So, I’m in a Food Lion
too soon, where every white man
has an unkempt beard
and keeps a hand in his pocket
or a thumb hooked on his belt
steering a cart with the other.
I make long eye contact
that asks, Do you feel
like killing people today?
And I’m really asking, really
using the power I honed
in childhood. I read these men:
the furrow between the brows,
the sag of the shoulders,
the line of the mouth. When a man
is about to strike, his top lip gets thin,
the teeth visible but not bared
like a dog’s, more like a faint smile.
The trick: take it in fast.
Don’t linger on the face or even the hands.
Hands are liars—casual, bored, the last
to move. All violence begins in the hips.
One man paces the produce
section without a cart.
His left hand busily ticking
as if he’s counting steps,
thumb to forefinger, then middle,
ring, pinkie, and over again.
I look for him at the top of each aisle
before I turn down the next.
His feet splay in clumsy sneakers,
not following the hips’ direction.
This man is no threat to anyone
today, which is how it always begins.
The Heat
I want to believe in abundance
the way my dog leaves himself
everywhere, and yet is here,
all of him, beside me now.
This late-spring heat—it’s not
summer quite, despite my son
spending long afternoons
at Anvil Rock with his girlfriend
where there’s no cell reception
and a long jump into a receding pool
on the troubled Greenbrier River.
As I was saying, this heat
has exacerbated the dog’s leaving.
His dander and fur float on air,
visible where the sun streaks
through the windows.
He’s never skint, not knowing
time is money, not caring
age is accumulation.
This new girl scares me,
how she possesses herself,
walks in the door during dinner
without knocking, shameless
as a conifer asked about leaves.
I want this for him, a girl
spilling into the world
out of her own turquoise
and coral banks. I want to believe
in abundance, that if he touches
bottom, his lithe body will arc
toward the light streaking
through the green water,
that he will surface unscathed
with fistfuls of smoky quartz.
Hymn for the Reparable
I’ve told you about the broken umbrella, the globe snapped
from its axis, the saltshaker shattered against the hearth,
the broken kid, my teeth breaking even now as I tell you this—
I’m tired. Let me tell you instead about the tiniest succulent
that spent the summer and fall dying on my windowsill.
Down to its last rubbery leaf, I began telling it about itself
in a low unbroken stream of sunlight. You are a newborn’s
thumbnail, tragus of the next prophet’s ear, perfect new tail
of the prairie skink. The many spiders repairing their broken webs
in the dark corners of my house are singing psalms for all
the living that goes on despite memory’s tilt toward the break.
Sarah Elkins lives in Lewisburg, WV. She holds an MFA from Pacific University. She is the director of the West Virginia Interscholastic Cycling League where she works to get more kids on bikes across the state. She and her husband operate Hammer Cycles bike shop and foster a boisterous cycling community in the Greenbrier Valley. Sarah’s life outside poetry is rooted in the same sense of place and ecopolitics that inform her writing. Find her at SarahElkins.com or on the trails.