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 or 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, Poet Laureate of Alabama
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 Permanent Marker is a stunning elegiac sequence for a
brother and the family he’s left behind. But the chapbook is also about
living through tremendous pain with grace and generosity, honest anger,
and empathy. The poems are elegant in their imagery, evocative in their
details, and artistic in their narrative focus. Sarah Cooper is a superb
poet of witness.
− Denise Duhamel
Put simply: Sarah Cooper’s Permanent Marker enchants us. In “Grandma’s House,” we find the young Cooper siblings playing Ouija in the basement, casting spells with pebbles and bird feathers, hypnotized by the “oranges and pinks and blues of the jams glistening on shelves.” Such youth can’t be preserved. And though Cooper’s poems make this gut-wrenchingly clear in narrating the loss of that brother from the cellar, all the mystery of youth — that strange potion of great joy and deep sadness — is carried into these poems like a talisman. Like the BB left in the sister’s chest, forgotten, until years later she steps from the shower, runs her wet fingers over the lump, “and remembered your face / in shock as you realized you had shot me.” − D. Gilson
Sarah Cooper's Permanent Marker is about the ways we are marked by loss and all the forms that loss may take. The ephemeral smell of her brother's cologne. His number and birthday, which she refuses to remove from her phone. Her brother’s baby teeth, which her father keeps in an Aleve bottle, suggesting the links this book traces between memory and pain. This is not a book about PTSD or addiction or brothers and sisters. It is about the collateral damage, the reverberating impact of loss on those left behind. − Ed Madden
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