Winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize
“I kept coming back to these poems—the tough lyric voice that got under my skin. Clear, intent, this poet doesn’t want to fool herself or anybody else. Desire pushes defeat against the wall, and the spirit climbs up from underground.”
-Marie Howe, from her judge’s citation
“Sandra Beasley slices her way down the page with precision and punch. Her haunting ‘Allergy Girl’ series will set off such an itch, I doubt you’ll ever fully recover . . . This poet leaves us to smolder and ache in small kingdoms where ‘even the tame dogs dream of biting clear to the bone.’”
-Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Sandra Beasley’s Theories of Falling has a vivacity and authority of imagination that constantly transforms her subject matter. Thus she can begin a poem called ‘The Story of My Family’ with ‘You’re a tooth I tongue and tongue, / tasting blood as you loosen, // testing the sweet root of the whole.’ Or announce, in another, that ’sorrows burrowed in above the bone and bloomed.’ Despite their frequent sources in the darker regions of experience, these lyric tales are tonic rather than toxic and written with a jaunty audacity that is utterly winning.’”
-Gregory Orr
“Some truths induce fevers; others offer fast relief. The unflinching, personal human truths in Sandra Beasley’s debut collection are worth the swallow, for not too long after, we awaken to both our healing and agitation.” -
-Major Jackson
From the book:
Trade paperback - $14.00 - ISBN #978-1930974746 - Pub. date April 2008
Available through many Barnes and Noble and Borders retailers; for those in the area of Washington, DC, available at Politics & Prose and Busboys & Poets. Also available through Partners Distribution (for bookstore orders), Amazon.com, Small Press Distributors, and directly from New Issues. Exam copy discounts are available for teachers. For more information on New Issues Poetry and Prose and to order, please go to their website.
Reviews:
- Zoland Poetry (Andrew Kozma) - The poems here show a mastery of metaphorical narrative, all the poems fitting together tightly towards a single goal even though the poems themselves tackle widely varying subjects….[T]hose poems that speak to you will whisper in your ear for days.
- Hayden’s Ferry Review blog (Sarah Vap) - There is ritual in this book: a searching for ritual, a creation of ritual. There is something in this collection that is purgative of the glories and the shames of growing up female right now: in the end, there’s the fire. And after the fire: the singing.
- Gently Read Literature (Caroline Klocksiem) - I first read Theories of Falling in a waiting room while getting my car serviced. I didn’t know I’d end up reviewing it at the time; I only knew that I kept wanting to read each next poem and eventually didn’t care how long my oil change would take.
- Barn Owl Review (Jay Robinson) - Sandra Beasley’s debut is bold and seductive, the kind of book you’d be drawn to even if you hadn’t seen it on the shelf wedged between Charles Baudelaire and Elizabeth Bishop….[W]hat makes it a truly remarkable collection is how Beasley undercuts the gravity of each theme with a fresh sense of metaphor, and how she challenges a poem’s limitations. Theories of Falling has not only given us a new voice to pay attention to, but it thrusts Sandra Beasley to the forefront of an increasing number of young, influential contemporary American poets.
- Galatea Resurrects (Karen Rigby) - One of the markers of Beasley’s many talents is her ability to achieve a genuine pathos through the careful sequencing of poems. Taken individually, the poems may at first seem like consistently hip, edgy missives, but together they transcend that and accumulate to the closing lines of the book in “The Door”:
Here is the church, here
is the steeple: a child
opens the door of her hands.
Inside, those people
never let her down.
- Blackbird (Susan Settlemyre Williams) - A poem exploring various metaphors for sex begins, “Bullet dodged, meant your thrust. Another: Load the gun.” Later in the poem, Beasley’s speaker notes, “Always, the body just an alias for something more urgent,” and recalls that, “Once you tried to call it making love and I said I don’t think / that counts, what we do.”…These are clearly not run-of-the-mill love poems.
- Rattle (Jeremy Voigt) - Whether she is writing about allergy suffering or a philosophical analysis of American culture, Beasley insists on surprise and humor of top order. Her humor is witty, rich, and has the tone of a weary voice that has come to the conclusion that one must laugh at oneself in order to deal with the pain of life.
- On the Seawall blog (Ron Slate) - Displaying a large, feisty ambition as well as the talent to realize it, Sandra Beasley’s first book, Theories of Falling, reminds me of something Robert Frost wrote to B.F. Skinner in 1926: “All that makes a writer is the ability to write strongly and directly from some unaccountable and almost invincible personal prejudice.”
- Untalented Writer blog (Justin Evans) - The subject matter for this book of poems is delightfully broad in spectrum. Longing, regret, even a magician’s assistant, all make appearances. But at the book’s center is the same, wonderful voice, always whispering secrets, telling stories out of school, and hinting at the extraordinary magic of this world just out of reach from our fingertips as we find ourselves falling (alright, so I meant that one) through our lives, trying to land on our feet.
// Last updated September 5, 2010 //