Blue Edge Books is a small press publishing good poetry.
Poems by Miriam Sagan
Thanks for Stopping By
Miriam Sagan brings the strength of her curiosity, a refreshing coldness, and an expansive awareness of history – personal, ancient, and scientific – to her encounter with her own mortality in this moving collection, Thanks for Stopping By. After receiving a frightening diagnosis, Sagan tracks the shifting moods of a life lived near death: its pleasures and amusements, irritations and confusions. Here love, family, memory, travel, and the unfathomable quotidian unfold alongside her contemplation of dying. These beautiful and often funny poems send reports from the border of life and death, a border we’re all traveling towards.
About Miriam Sagan
Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. She works with text and sculptural installation as part of creative duo Maternal Mitochondria (with Isabel Winson-Sagan). Her poetry has been set to music for the Santa Fe Women's Chorus, incised on stoneware for haiku pathways, and projected as video inside abandoned buildings.
Photo of Miriam Sagan by Matt Morrow.
Excerpt from : Thanks for Stopping By
by Miriam Sagan
sometimes it takes a soft night snowfall
to remind me:
things that go away
never come back
all my friends
know this is true, yet
no one
will talk about it
reading a poem aloud in Spanish
a language in which I know only two words:
“nevada” and “lamentar”
I keep myself company on the unmade bed
you’ve gone out
I stay at home
everyone knows
it will soon be the exact opposite
but no one listens when
I try to talk about it