Best Bones

There is a strange feeling as you turn the pages of 'Best Bones' by Sarah Rose Nordgren. Something is out of kilter, unorthodox may be the proper term but I do believe original best describes the poetry of Nordgren. She is a narrative poet dwelling equally in the shadows and light of life.

These poems, crisp and lovely in their language, are unwaveringly devoted to charting the strangeness of the female experience.

Sarah Rose Nordgren's Best Bones is a book rich in architecture and the bones of architecture. She shows us 'what a long hinge the body makes'—and reminds us that there are indeed 'stories we live in against nature' and 'rooms . . . built from twine.' The voices and narratives within her poems do more than haunt; they resound, reverberate within and without the lyric enclosures she has made for them. Best Bones is beautiful—a stunning, welcome debut.

With her love for fable and folklore, her courting of the uncanny, and her intensive use of dramatic monologue, Sarah Rose Nordgren arrives among us with a minutes-to-midnight voice: stagy, controlling, and quietly alarmed, but always intimate—an indiscreet whisper telling us of events and feelings that we must give ourselves up to totally. Its shadow life glows as keenly as the light, and its light seems almost helpless. A terrific debut by a poet to watch.

Startling and alive, Sarah Rose Nordgren's Best Bones introduces a poet of intense lyricism and narrative compression. These deeply felt poems have an ineffable strangeness yet a sense of rightness. Some terrify like childhood stories. Some amaze like myths. All are beautifully imagined, hauntingly observant, and contain a dynamic tension between the cool surface of craft and the human heat of the heart. Ready yourself, American poetry, for this phenomenal new voice.

It's rare to discover a collection that is unique in its severity, one that equally makes you cringe and keeps you reading with mutual ease. And ['Best Bones'], by far, was one of those collections, so much so that I found it difficult to put my admiration into words. Nordgren creates . . . the most beautiful disparate meaning through her pairing of the subtle and the severe. . . . You need to take the time to emotionally invest yourself in these pages. It's demanding and raw and lovely and is so desperately worth your time. You won't regret it for a second.