Dear Letters in the Red Box (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781639808342)

Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term "interbeing" to describe the deep connectiveness of all things. Reading Dear Letters in the Red Box, I feel how Sarah Stern internalizes that concept in her poems. She doesn't shy away from the sadness of time passing, bittersweet memories, or the difficulties we face in our current world. "My dark heart, I hear you," she says. Yet Stern is full of love - for her parents, for herself, for all the people and events that have touched her life. "I can't explain the joy," she writes. "It appeared somehow."

-Katrinka Moore, author, Diminuendo

Sarah Stern invites you to a "tea party / in a foreign land." You are transported to a table filled with treats, some delicate, some devastating. She writes of her mother, her Oma, the Bronx and Brooklyn, marble moons, travel notes and road trips, even clip-on earrings. Stern shows us how to look "for stars out on the field... We're all trying to name things / in the dark, / reconfigure what was and what will be." Stern's Dear Letters in the Red Box holds poignant poems that confront and try to give name to the randomness of nature, our lives, and a world so fragile, she wants to "cradle it / like a newborn."

-Janet R. Kirchheimer, author, How to Spot One of Us and Seduction: Out of Eden

Dear Letters in the Red Box is an opening to the author's gentle awareness of the world, where images and impressions assemble or alight mosaic-like with space enough for readers to find themselves with time enough to hold each fragment or memory. The occasional artifact is, in one moment, the object of unsentimental curiosity, and with a turn is subject to whimsy in co-occurrence or in prosaic happenstance, and so becomes charged. There's such talent masked in her light, deft touch. The collection is a landscape built of memory - the vaguely specific - where sadness and fiery freedom dance, where a wish threads generations in search of order. Stern's poems honor what's unnamed in life and how our gaps are drawn closed only by seeking. She knows these gaps and sings into them.

-Jeffrey M. Eisenbrey, Poetry Editor, Clockhouse