Reaching

by Sarah Lawson

“When Sarah Lawson brushes the hair off their face, it regathers mostly where it was. “It’s just reached its final form,” they say of something they are about to read. “Lawson rejected an early design of their book, reaching (July 2021), and substituted their own. “They set it the way that they saw it,” says Nahitchevansky. The cover was a collaboration: “I had found this box of aerial photographs, and Sarah said, ‘Well, I want them red.’” It was made so, and they were affixed to a matte blue paper. As I bought my copy, I was given a choice of three and picked the one with the most trees. I like how their shadows make the woods look like water.

Like Chalmers, Lawson uses page breaks for formal variation, with blocks of prose seated across from double-spaced verse. The narration’s second-person pronoun gradually yields to the first. Densely woven, insistent repetitions knot internal rhyme, alliteration, and consonance for a catalog of extenuating circumstances.

The voice seems to maintain more than one conversation, interrupting itself to speak over its shoulder. Once, a word even invades another: “repla//surrounds//cing.” The poem’s comma-separated values are sometimes distinct and sometimes dependent, broken otherwise by em-dashes, semicolons, question marks, lacunae, slashes and double-slashes, and the very occasional full stop.

“You dream you keep the heart and for a little while, I know I lived forever once.” Lawson returns to the idea of eternal life set in the indeterminate past. Elsewhere, in a passage of color observations, vision becomes metaphor for feeling: “I feel blue and you feel everything there is to see.” For all its playfulness, it is an intensely personal work. “what do I make public of this,” it asks, and proceeds to answer, by turns tentative and assured.” — Maxwell Paparella

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