Flyway

Few poets have rendered the wrenching of war's dislocations with such intensity and beauty as Sarah Ens. Flyway is sorrow artfully spun into a lyric that mends as it quests, gathers, scatters, and laments. Her family's story of the all-too-common women's flight for survival emerges with intimacy and urgency. This book is a triumph for any time, but savour it now, as power and grace against a troubled world.

-Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields

situates itself as a poem in a biodiverse temporality where all species of home are rooted. Its address, O / downtrodden / stray, directed to those scrambling for purchase on a soft ridge of song, is a balm so many people on the planet could use right now. The question that persists, that thrums beneath this poem is as simple and endangered as tallgrass: How do you remember home?

-Sue Goyette, Ocean

Following the devastation and dislocation of war, Flyway is a haunting that becomes an inheritance. Tracing migrations both inexorable and precarious, with the tallgrass as her teacher, Sarah Ens creates a work of imagination wider than the horizon.

is a tender and urgent re-negotiation of place, displacement, memory, and war. The poems are elemental, touched by bread and metal, grass and stone.

-Benjamin Hertwig, Slow War