Sarah Kay

So yeah, for this collection, so you are correct that I have five books, but I actually, three of those books are single poem hardcover books that I made with my lifelong collaborator, Sophia Janowitz, who provided beautiful art for them.

So three of them are like one poem each.

But I actually only have two collections.

The first one came out 11 years ago.

And then this one just came out in April.

And so it's been a decade of time.

Totally different era, if you will.

Different era, different everything.

And you write a lot of poems in 10 years.

And so when I started looking at...

all of those poems and with my amazing editor, Maya Millett, together we noticed this theme of a person

reaching for poetry to process whatever was happening at that moment in her life.

So this book ended up being sort of like a chronology of my reaching for poetry.

And the book is in three sections.

The first section shows me

the way that i reached for poetry as a young person moving out of childhood and specifically to help me process the introduction of violence into my consciousness and my life personal violence gendered violence systemic violence and then the second section is

using poetry to process falling in love and, spoiler alert, heartbreak, and also reaching and searching in the way that I did as a young person.

And then the third section of the book is a reflection of where I am now, which is reaching for poetry to help me process aging and mortality and the sort of newer moments

moments in which I reach for poetry.

And that became the project of the book.