Upkeep

By Sara London

The poems in Sara London's Upkeep offer a guidebook for both coping with and negotiating the difficult terrain of life after great personal loss. In the book's opening section, the speaker explains to a Martian the ways we earthlings attempt to raise our dead--"you'll find that with dreams // we exhume our dead without the mess /of upturned dirt"--and later finds comfort in objects that connect her to her late Mr. Fix-It father. These are elegies whose solemnity has been upended by humor and the nuanced interrogations of the daily rituals that heal us. "How do you / do it, start the experiment-- / gas up, each day, anew?" she asks. Oatmeal and duct tape help, London suggests, but ultimately the heart decides: The "old tubes, they play on."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 194558839X
• ISBN13: 9781945588396
• Release Date: September 2019
• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 9.6"