Sarah Cortez – författare

The poems of Sarah Cortez flex lean muscles to build lyric intensity and a gripping edginess often backlit by an incandescent, controlled eroticism. Cortez reveals the hidden underworld of her fellow police officers, whose lives comprise the thin blue line and whose blood sometimes splashes and blackens on summer concrete.

Over twenty years ago, Sarah Cortez left a flourishing corporate career to strap on a gun, and police the streets. Transitioning from designer heels and a high-rise office to a low-bid, agency-owned Crown Vic wasn’t easy, but it delivered exactly what she desired. In these highly-charged personal reflections, Cortez reveals the complicated machinery of a cop’s heart, mind, and soul by dissecting the differences between cops and civilians. A must-read to understand the intangibles demanded by policing—courage, determination, patience, and a belief in justice—despite the grimy backdrop where life can become death in an instant.

Cold Blue Steel contains fifty lyric poems set in the world of the urban street cop in Houston, the nation’s fourth largest metropolis.In the patrol car, at scenes of suicides and DOAs, in the overtime reality of aching feet and sweating torsos, the reader experiences the hard realities and unexpected luminosities of doing America’s most dangerous job.