Vivarium

$19.95

by Natasha Sajé

A vivarium is an enclosure for living things — plants or animals — which might likewise be said of a poem. With a vivacious sensibility and unruly leaps from elegiac to ironic, Sajé’s new book is an abecedarium, fully using the page, and challenging all manner of received wisdom. Employing lyrics, lists, arguments, narratives, and meditations, and including prose poems devoted to particular letters as well as invented visual or conceptual pieces, in Vivarium the alphabet is endowed with power far beyond usefulness. Form breathes life in this book, and the lived emotion of these poems defies death.

by Natasha Sajé

A vivarium is an enclosure for living things — plants or animals — which might likewise be said of a poem. With a vivacious sensibility and unruly leaps from elegiac to ironic, Sajé’s new book is an abecedarium, fully using the page, and challenging all manner of received wisdom. Employing lyrics, lists, arguments, narratives, and meditations, and including prose poems devoted to particular letters as well as invented visual or conceptual pieces, in Vivarium the alphabet is endowed with power far beyond usefulness. Form breathes life in this book, and the lived emotion of these poems defies death.

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About the Author

Natasha Sajé’s first book of poems, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and her second collection, Bend (Tupelo, 2004), was given the Utah Book Award in Poetry. Her book of essays Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory will be published by the University of Michigan Press in 2014. She teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.

Advanced Praise

“Sajé’s contagious appetite for the world makes reading Vivarium a heady experience: I never knew where the next poem might take me, but I wanted to go…. Sajé’s drive to communicate wills an ever-more-innovative search for prosodic forms—note, letter, ode, essay, litany, prayer, index, and interview—yet the prizing of solitude balances her appetite for engagement.” – Robin Becker, Georgia Review

“Sajé actually takes the reader back to his or her most basic understanding of language and gives that understanding a violent and welcomed push. Vivarium, an abecedarian book, is pure, verbose kinetic energy. These are poems that we learn from. It is as if Sajé comes to life in them and sometimes reads to us, sometimes plays with us, and it is for each reader to interpret where each piece leads. Collectively, though, these poems force us to examine our darknesses. The result is beautiful.” — Barn Owl Review

“There is something quite compelling in the playful way in which Sajé’s poems stretch, bounce and lean, accumulating themselves into a kind of map-making structure, opening into parts both familiar and unknown. Poems are included alphabetically, titled either by single letters or phrases, and left to accumulate towards a structure that is held together with ease; a single unit that is playful, tight and almost bulletproof.” — Rob McLennan

“In Vivarium, Natasha Sajé, one of poetry’s most ludic and encyclopedic essayists, explores language — and the alphabet — in terms both acerbic and lush, exposing the roots of the world’s ills, and its many rooted pleasures. In a word, zowie!” — Mary Ruefle

“Resourceful, restless, witty and substantially intelligent — what a rare combination of erudition and nimbleness this group of poems exhibits. Their range is marvelously wide in both form and tone… Each poem surprised me, taught me something, delighted and illuminated and stretched.” —Dean Young, in a citation for the Academy of American Poets’ 2008 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-571080-39-7