SPECIAL DELIVERY by Natasha Sajé

Special Delivery holds a variety of poetic forms, missives to which the speaker doesn’t expect a reply. The addressees—including the Phaistos disk, Caitlyn Jenner, and the wind—cannot or will not answer, but the reader is invited to take their place. Gender, sexual orientation, and the environment provide contexts for epistemological questions that pepper these poems of longing and wonder, of pique and wit.

“Marvelously inventive, these wise poems combine a researcher’s discipline with an action painter’s freedom. Sajé addresses aspects of contemporary culture (‘Dear Roe v. Wade,’ ‘Dear Spiral Jetty’) with dynamism and wit. Here, the personal and political ignite, fissuring received ideas to investigate how we live in the present and how we imagine the future. I admire the deft and fearless intimacy that powers this chapbook.”

—Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me