Sarah Cooper has written the new queer elegy. At once intimate & brutally beautiful, this series of swan songs-for hiding one's true self, for a future that includes a mother-is crafted with the visceral imagery of eros & its near never arrival. 89% is a bold & striking debut. - Meg Day, author of Last Psalm at Sea Level Sometimes, a poem can show us a map of the human heart and all its pumping valves, all the blood it welcomes and lets go. In 89%, Sarah Cooper gives us that map from all angles-the love and loss of a mother, the loss and love of self, the way romantic love can scare us into silence. In this stunning debut collection, Cooper splays open these moments of tenderness with precision and skill. This book is both the carving knife and the soothing balm. These poems have an unflinching eye-they see all the way through us and then swaddle us in whole, critical heartbeat of truth.
- Ashley M. Jones, author of Reparations NOW! and dark // thing Sarah Cooper's 89% is part elegy, part ecstatic ode to romantic love, and 100% gorgeous. She grieves a mother lost to illness, takes a hard look at our heteronormative society, and celebrates both familial and romantic relationships. Cooper's poems contain a delightful tension between closeness and fear of that closeness, the real and artifice. - Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story and Scald The poems in Sarah Cooper's debut collection 89% remind us that to examine a death is to examine a life. They are poems of inquiry, close observation, and experimentation. Structured as steps of the scientific method, the sections of 89% ask questions about how we grieve the losses that engulf us, how we reconcile with "what norms / have done to [our bodies]," and how we live in queer bodies. Both elegy and love story, the poems in 89% show us that understanding our bodies, the bodies who brought us into the world, and the bodies we've loved and lost is an iterative process, one that insists we will always be learning.
-Julia Koets, author of Pine and The Rib Joint 89% is a monumental accomplishment, a young woman's incredible journey with her living and dying mother, with her waking queer self as well-in poems so seamless and real and close to the very bone of life, that I couldn't put it down, couldn't wait for the next poem, for the next quote from Cooper's mother, who is the star of the show, for sure, who shares the stage with her amazing daughter, who has captured my heart as I know she will capture yours, reader. And if you think I might be weeping right now, you're right. Sarah Cooper has my heart. I know she will have yours as well. - Maureen Seaton, author of Sweet World and Sex Talks to Girls: A Memoir Sarah Cooper's debut collection is a tender, plangent, and deeply affecting dialogue between a grown lesbian daughter and a mother battling colon cancer. These poems are presented as the speaker's lyric responses to her mother's "calls," witty advice and astute admonitions like "Making bets with me is a bad idea--me losing is you losing" and "If you don't have anything nice to say, write it down." 89% reads as queer reckoning, as testament to enduring love and impending loss, as what happens when a poet reaches beyond the scripted niceties to wrangle with the hardest truths. -Julie Marie Wade, author of Skirted and Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems.