Gray Matter

Sara Michas-Martin, former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, has taught creative writing and interdisciplinary studies widely, most recently for Goddard College and Stanford's Online Writers' Studio.

"Michas-Martin writes in beautifully tight language, making just about every word carry weight." -Poets' Quarterly "This eloquent work offers the reader a rare mix of lyrical intensity and abstract rigor. These are poems of inner adventure and outward event, the one sometimes easing into the other like figures at dusk. The narratives here are compelling and the craft hard-earned, making for a wonderful debut collection." -- -Eavan Boland "Michas-Martin is investigative and clear spoken in her debut collection, with a unified focus on the interior self and its interactions with both the utilitarian body and the external world." -Publishers Weekly "'Laughter in the pantry,' a deer's 'antlers askew,' an 'echo of high heels,' a lake of memory lapping-Michas-Martin conveys with startling clarity what only seems to have been lost. And those losses, with an eerie familiarity, are returned unto us, as our own. In these poems reader and author move together through kindred synapses of memory and desire as if the gray matter herein is shared or at least newly blown open for our mutual and wondrous scrutiny. The truth of Yeats' 'In dreams begins responsibility' finds us through a heartfelt voice and a steely eye." -- -Nance Van Winckel "What do I know about poetry? Brains are my business. Well, I know this: great poetry takes the brain by surprise (not merely the reflective self) knocking the neurons out of kilter, just a little, but enough to shock them into fresh patterns of perception, if only for an instant. Gray Matter is an extraordinary collection. I read it, neurons a-buzz, in a single, absorbed sitting. I'm not sure that's what one is supposed to do with poems as rich, visceral and playfully profound as these. But what do I know about poetry?" -- -Paul Broks Neuropsychologist "These poems are kaleidoscopic and pulsing; their living focus shows us that instability too has its elegance, that thought like music is in movement. This is a vibrant, beautifully synaptic book." -- -Dean Young "Around the head / stirs a haze of gases" and "I'll try this once more / despite everyday distortions," says Sara Michas-Martin, a poet who works stubbornly at Knowing and simultaneously examines the equipment and mechanisms by which we attempt to know. It is that stubborn, intrepid threading-the-needle-kind-of-thinking that makes the poems in Gray Matter fresh and reliable. These poems are personal,but not self-involved, intelligent but always accessible and humble about the fallibility of the intellect. She's our poet-as-explorer, doing the human fieldwork in the world, right in her own back yard. It is an illuminating experience to sit on her shoulder as she goes forward, reminding us what experience is: "impossible / to name directly / a scent that opens on you / like a fire alarm /carrot yanked clear out of the ground." -- -Tony Hoagland

• Illusion of One *** In Sleep the Brain Retrieves a Snake Please Do Not Touch Elegy If I Think about It Female Dorm, Barcelona The Empty Museum How Are You Feeling? Cage All Night I Felt My Teeth Loosening *** Return More Than One Way to Drown That You Might Know It Again Olfaction In My Kid Bed, Sleeping, Shotguns Stored Below Vision Friendship South What to Name This The Same and the Next *** Spoil Song Desire Trichotillomania Staff after Hours Crush Audition Gustation Tryst In a Time of Transition Since He Asked Marriage *** Imperfectly Divided Capgras Syndrome For Better Problems to Solve: Methods Invented Synaptic Sprawl Cotard Syndrome Cafe, Person Crying Utility Off Season *** Notes