Overview

Lucky to Have You is a collection of narrative lyric poems that meditate on romantic loss and love. Loss and luck are synonymous; luck always appears amid heartbreak, and in moments of unexpected luck, aged sorrow rears its wrinkled forehead. The collection comprises three sections: ""Lucky to Find You,"" ""Lucky to Keep You,"" and ""Lucky to Lose You."" These imitation love poems travel up and down the East Coast- from Virginia to New York- and shadow all kinds of marriages that died under the weight of addiction and infidelity, or power dynamics across religious assaults, or the possibility of first dates, or the stalled gift of situationships, or deep, authentic interracial love swamped in an America that refuses to face its own history. Turning community rejection on its head, questioning her own privileges, this narrator arrives somewhat intact, having survived early intimate violence. Residue is revelation. Yet, she remains hopeful, grounded in the triad of luck, love, and loss, ready to get back up again.

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Reviews

If this poet's face is ""fragile like a bomb and an orchid"" so too are her words and the world she draws for us in Lucky to Have You. It is a world where messages are beaten on the edge of a bed frame in ""a morse code."" A world in which we are rooting for her from the beginning, drawn in by her storytelling, her beauty telling. In this world we learn not to forsake ourselves or the poet, a brave translator of grief, grit and becoming. Ultimately this is a journey that ends in power. -Theta Pavis, author of The Red Strobe Sarah Jefferis is the rare poet who is both unflinching in her truth-telling and exquisite in her metaphor. Lucky to Have You, is a beautiful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable collection that reads like a story-a story you devour in a single sitting. She mixes delightfully specific diction with brutally hard ideas. -Dr. Anne Elrod Whitney, author of Inkwell and Teaching Writers to Reflect The chant that recognizes, the chant that eschews, the oblique flow-and keep in mind ""love never evaporates""-the stumble into a familiar morass, the seeing it through to the arrival at a greater reckoning: the one who survives can thrive. Sarah Jefferis writes of difficult interpersonal terrain, naming instead of silencing, pronouncing instead of renouncing. Images, metaphor, sequences-and surprising penultimate turns-code break familial angst, impoverishment, unconscionable abuse, religious trappings and real faith, anniversaries that trigger tenderness and bitterness. Fearless, fierce, these poems vocalize a way-back ancestry of women willing to follow risk into courage, and a mother's riddle of learning from her daughters. Lucky To Have You is a transformative book, proof that luck-and life-and poetry-are what we assiduously make them. -Mary Gilliland, author of The Devil's Fools

Author Information

Dr. Sarah Jefferis holds an MA from Hollins University, an MFA in Poetry from Cornell, and a PhD in Lit/Creative Writing from Binghamton University. Poetry publications include Forgetting the Salt (Foothills Press, 2008) and What Enters the Mouth (Standing Stone Books, 2017) as well as poems/essays have appeared in The North American Review, The Catamaran, The Cimarron Review, Rhino, The American Literary Review, The Patterson Review, Door is a Jar, NYQ, Croak, On the Seawall, The Wild Roof Journal and others. She has been a poetry and essay fellow at Saltonstall Foundation of the Arts in New York, The Community of Writers in California, and Mass Moca in Massachusetts. In addition to being a lecturer at Cornell, she is also the CEO of her own writing consultant business called: Write.Now. You can find her at www.sarahjefferis.com

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