|
If There Is No Wind
by Margaret R. Sáraco
71 poems ~ 96 pages
Price: $15.00
Publisher: Human Error Publishing
ISBN-10: 1948521113
ISBN-13: 978-1948521116
To Order: https://linktr.ee/margaretsaraco
ABOUT THE BOOK:
If There Is No Wind is a collection of poems incorporating a variety of themes, including family, love, and activism. The title of the collection is from the poem, “If Wind Were Erased from Earth.” What would happen if the wind disappeared from our fragile earth? Some poems unearth grief and loss, while others celebrate the beautiful world we live in. The book ends with two short poems, “Quiet Moment,” and “Invocation,” meditations to get through our days and subsequent lives.
ADVANCE PRAISE
Sáraco's collection of poems is the result of a deep and empathic listening, with an eye toward detail, often so miniscule and simple, as to be overlooked. The forces of nature with all its inherent beauty and unpredictability merges with dreams, memory, lineage, and inheritance, to create a lens through which to make sense of a world in which joy and suffering exist in a world changed by school shootings and domestic terrorism, but also cognizant of the precious act of waking up and taking another breath. These poems will make you think and feel, while making you grateful to be alive.
–Michelle Reale, Author of Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily and Blood Memory: Prose Poems.
Margaret R. Sáraco's gift is her ability to translate the everyday acts of living, into unique, beautiful moments of poetry. This work, which we can find ourselves in, is generous, kind, brilliant, and shot through with a bit of sadness which highlights the moments of joy. Composed of tight language, beautiful images, and resonant sound, If There is No Wind is to be kept close at hand as a companion and guide.
–CMarie Fuhrman, co-editor Native Voices
If There Is No Wind is a book of frank wonder–frank in its clear-eyed assessment of “human cruelty,” asking “What will become of us?”; wonder at the healing beauty of nature, family, art, “the ordinary, the lived in.” In taking all of this on, Margaret R. Sáraco reminds us that “We, the flawed, inherit the earth,” but this news should be as much comfort as indictment. After all, it suggests that “you are not alone,” and that “there can still be great//abundance.” These poems are, in a wounded time, a much-needed salve.
–David Ebenbach, author of What’s Left to Us by Evening
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Margaret R. Sáraco is a writer, teacher, and activist. The first woman to attend college in her family, she earned degrees in theater, women’s studies, and mathematics. Margaret taught middle school math and writing in Montclair, NJ, for many years, where she lives and raised two children with her partner. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous publications including Exit 13, Kerning/A Space for Words, Lips, Ovunque Siamo, Paterson Literary Review, Peregrine Journal, Poeming Pigeon, and The Path. Several of her poems were selected for the New Jersey Covid-19 Storytelling Project. Margaret was a semi-finalist in the inaugural Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Contest in 2022 and received Honorable Mention in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest in 2020 for her poem, “The Unlocked Door.”
FROM THE BOOK:
Tempest
by Margaret R. Sáraco
A torrential rain collects on the flat roof
across from where I sit safe and dry
in a corridor near a large picture window.
Someone tells me there is a slight pitch
to the roof channeling water.
I wait for the liquid to spill over the edge
like an overfilled pot in the sink.
The unsettling sound of thunder echoes in the hallway
the flash of lightning irritates my eyes.
As the downpour continues, my thoughts
move from storm to patient.
Trapped and dry in the waiting, always in the waiting,
I cannot touch the unease that ripens my insides.
Strange how time continues slowly in the hospital
and then the day is gone.
I wonder how long it will be before
the roof refuses to hold the rain
forcing the water to comply with the laws of physics
and, despite the supposed human control
of leaders and gutters,
floods the grounds.
|
