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The Scarecrow of My Former Self: poems of illness and grace, published by MoonPath Press, is available for order from Bookshop.org (support independent bookstores!), Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
Sarah Stockton’s Scarecrow of My Former Self … is a reclamation of visibility not just for Stockton’s speaker, but for all who have a chronic illness. These poems create a metaphorical scarecrow, a kind of spiritual scaffold on which to hang some hope. Like a conjurer, Stockton creates a world of desire crafted from “bloodied dancing shoes, a mask // and a sea green bathing suit…
Jill Khoury, Editor-in-Chief of Rogue Agent, author of Suites for the Modern Dancer (Sundress Publications) and Chance Operations (Paper Nautilus).
With vulnerability and gorgeous, lush imagery, Sarah Stockton presents a portrait of a life not defined by illness, but circumscribed by it; a hybrid life of hospital visits and encounters with crystal healers, coyotes, iguanas. Stockton's poems of simultaneous rage and grace illuminate the realities of the chronically ill.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Flare, Corona (BOA Editions) and Field Guide to the End of the World (Moon City Press)
Castaway
Available Now from Glass Lyre Press
“Full of salt and sea, sailors and manta rays, Stockton’s Castaway is a seawall against loneliness and despair. She plumbs those difficult depths, looking into the face of dementia, illness, homelessness, and death, but she also makes room for a wedge of light. Stockton shows us, in poem after poem, how they are the lighthouses that make possible this dark voyaging.”
–Dayna Patterson, author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books)
“In Sarah Stockton’s Castaway, a meditative collection of epistolaries, syllogisms, and spells, she calls back to the child self, a sailor’s daughter, and forward/inward to the adult self, a lover and friend. Alive to the sensory pleasures and pains of the world, in these poems we find a “goddess cavorting in her sea-spursed den,” “sorrow slips past the fact-checkers,” and “the heart is/ the center of the trunk of a tree.”
–Maya Jewell Zeller, author of Alchemy for Cells and Other Beasts (Entre Ríos Books), Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press), Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press), and co-editor of Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest (Scablands Books)
About Sarah
Poetry
River Mouth Review