Winn, Sarah Ann: Alma Almanac

Alma Almanac by Sarah Ann Winn (Barrow Street Press, paperback)

Publication Date: October 3, 2017

Publisher Marketing: Poetry. "ALMA ALMANAC is a stunningly original collection of poems about landscape, place, and memory. It is a lyrical scrapbook of skies, weather, stars, myths, recipes, rituals, and spells. From it, one can learn 'How to Haunt,' how 'To Preserve November,' and even find 'Instructions for Assembling a Bento Box Memorial.' In addition to the more traditional poems, the book is 'illustrated' with a series of short descriptions of objects, photos, and remembered sounds. These stark fragments, labeled and numbered like catalogue items, give a sense of the poet as curator, arranging, displaying, and creating her own museum of personal effects. Rather than narrating what they're supposed to mean, I admire the restraint of simply letting these powerful details speak for themselves. I can guarantee this book is very pleasurable to read, as sensual as 'the spectrum of apple colors' and as insistent as an audio cassette of a woman's voice that 'whispers the same five words again and again. Promise me you won't forget.'"—Elaine Equi

"Sarah Ann Winn knows 'darkness dilates, / never swallows us whole' and that the weight of memory is not its only force. ALMA ALMANAC is a guidebook for the conditions of its dark dilations; its instructions are accompanied by notes, beatitudes, mix tapes, imaginary figures, and lost wonders. These poems offer orientation by reaching into our desires and our imaginations. These beautiful lyrics slow and expand time, their layered rhythms 'unstung / by speed,' and initiate us not into miracle fantasies but into the visionary possible."—Mary Szybist

"In Sarah Ann Winn's ALMA ALMANAC, I am struck by the absolute radiance of these poems. They are at once a documentary and a reverie, with amazing knowledge of, and reverence for, the world they offer the reader. It is a rich world, what Guy Davenport calls 'the geography of imagination,' where each thing rhymes with another, where each burden's echo is a blessing, a surprise, and a delight. Winn has found in the almanac a perfect form for the hybridity of her ambitious, intimate, and moving project."—Eric Pankey