“If it is to be of any value / a story will be misunderstood” — that’s Sarah Sarai in The Strapless Bra in Heaven. A visionary who can’t quite keep a straight face, a prophet quicker to laughter than judgment, Sarai is a virtuoso of the one-liner — “too much is as it seems” — but she works with a vast cultural canvas, and sorrow and a thirst for the real underlie, the scintillating eloquence. Dante’s journey is a dream, Stalin’s famine never ends, Dido weeps in the city she built, humans wander through a world of staggering beauty never quite knowing how to love each other: “What do monkeys worry about? / Our imaginations grown dim?” The Strapless Bra in Heaven is a roller coaster, but it's grounded in what we once called wisdom. Sarai’s new book is a thrilling read.
—D. Nurkse, author of Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult
***
Sarah Sarai is the author of the poetry collections The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX[books]) and Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books). An independent editor in New York, she holds an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.
Paperback: 79 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (November 30, 2019)
Reviews:
Compulsive Reader
Heavy Feather Review
Necromancy Never Pays