Natasha Sajé’s first book of poems, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994), was chosen from over 900 manuscripts to win the Agnes Lynch Starrett prize, and was later awarded the Towson State Prize in Literature. Her second collection of poems, Bend, was published by Tupelo Press in 2004 and awarded the Utah Book Award in Poetry. Poems in her third book, Vivarium (Tupelo Press, 2014) received the Alice Fay di Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America. The book won the 15 Bytes Award. Her book of essays about poetry, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory, was published by the University of Michigan press also in 2014. Terroir: Love, Out of Place, a memoir-in-essays, is forthcoming from Trinity University Press in 2020.
Sajé was born in Munich, Germany, in 1955 and grew up in New York City and Northern New Jersey. She earned a B.A. from the University of Virginia (1976), an M.A. from Johns Hopkins (1980), and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park (1995), for a study titled, "'Artful Artlessness': Reading the Coquette in the Novel, 1724-1913." Her honors include the Bannister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College, the Robert Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the 2002 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Slovenia, a Camargo Fellowship in France, and grants from the states of Maryland and Utah. Sajé was a Maryland poet-in-the-schools 1989-1998. Her poems, reviews, and essays appear in many periodicals, including The New York Times, The Henry James Review; Kenyon Review; Missouri Review; New Republic; Paris Review; Poetry; Rhino; American Poetry Review; Ploughshares; Copper Nickel; and The Writer’s Chronicle. Sajé has been teaching in the low residency Vermont College MFA in Writing Program since 1996, and since 1998 has been a professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where she directs the Weeks Poetry Series
Works
(Four Poems from Vivarium, Tupelo, 2014)
Anathema
Anathema
With the judgment of the priests in their white amices and albs, their cinctures, stoles and
chasubles,
The bishops in their mitres pointing to the sky,
The rabbis in yarmulkahs and tallits, tasseled and clipped,
The saints in their garments embroidered with compass and square,
The ayatollahs in black turbans and white beards,
And all the rest of the righteous clergy
Who every day are more sure of their faith
And every day know more of the heresies
I practice and teach—
And with the consent of the elders and of all the congregations
In the presence of the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud,
In multiple cathedrals and cloisters,
Mosques and minarets, synagogues and temples
Etcetera etcetera and with precepts
Written herein with the curse Elisha laid upon the children and with all the curses
Which are written in the law and not in the law—
And through those who have endeavored by diverse threats and laws and promises
To take me from my way
Of living outside religion
Who raise a lead rod over my soul
Whose axes ring in my flesh
Who will not pardon me—
I refuse the word of God written by man, the thurible and ciborium, the rosary and
offertory,
My wine and bread unconsecrated, my soul unreconstructed—
Cursed am I by day and cursed by night
Cursed in sleeping and cursed in waking
Cursed in going out and cursed in going in—
Let the wrath and the fury of the righteous henceforth be kindled against me
And lay upon me all the spells they care to imagine—
Destroy my name under every religion and
Cut me off for my undoing from all such tribes—
So that I may live as if I am already dead.
E
E
essay, to try, from exagiare, to weigh out, examine
I was eleven and watching the Galloping Gourmet with his British-Australian accent and
his glass of wine
learning how to get juice out of a lemon by rolling it hard on the counter
when the doorbell rang
my hair around cans to make it straight
the man next door, his receding hair combed back
erminea, the weasel whose fur turns from brown to white in winter
asked if anyone else were home
I said no
edentate, lacking teeth
asked if he could come in
electric, from Greek, elektron, amber, because it produces sparks when rubbed
I said no, I’m sorry
euphemism, to speak with good words
we stood eye to eye
eutrophic: a body of water with so much mineral & organic matter the oxygen is reduced
until I slowly shut the door in his face
Eve, from Hebrew, living
pushing with both hands
H
H
O how we hanky panky harum
scarum in our happy home, dancing hootchy
kootchy. Sure, it makes for hugger mugger
but we give a hoot for happenstance.
The yard is full o’ hound and hares; the door
adorned by hammer and sickle; in the closets, hand-
me-downs. If Hammurabi and his Queen come
by, we won’t be hoity-toity, we’l offer haggis or humble pie. Our bed
floats on hocus-pocus (our corpore wholly habeas) and the kitchen hums
a hymn, Hail to Higgledy-Piggledly.
If the world can’t call our hurly burly hunky
dory, let it hara-kiri if it dares.
Sluice Pool Turn
Sluice Pool Turn
What kind of wings
would let us soar through glue?
Too bad we’re stuck on earth,
discovering cells
soaked in nitrogen, in rain’s
acid runoff burning
from copper mines. Or oil burning
seabirds’ beaks and wings.
We don’t demand companies rein
in messes even as they screw
us over with what they sell:
toxins everywhere; who on earth
knew (Pliny did!) that unearthed
asbestos, plus what we burn,
flush, and dump, (not to mention cell
phones), would shadow us, wings
of a bird of prey? We’re the mice, glued
and trapped by our precipitates.
So much for drinking rain
or growing carrots in soil
full of lead. The nasty stew
makes quite a meal; it burns
our nostrils and our eyes, swings
the scales of health. For sale:
natural killer T cells
that work (or not) against the reign
of Mercury (the one with wings)
in air, in water, and on earth.
Heads ache before they roll, burnished
by an intravenous goo
administered by cheerful crews
to curb the growth of cells,
along with radiation burn,
surgery and pills: healing pain,
we hope. Living on a ruined earth,
we walk to cure. Winged
horses burned into glue,
and the earth sold short
in our reign with neither wing nor prayer.
Bibliography
Books of Poems
- The Future Will Call You Something Else (under consideration)
- Vivarium (2014, Tupelo Press) 15 Bytes Book Award, Alice Fay di Castagnola Award
- Bend (2004, Tupelo Press) Utah Book Award for Poetry
- Red Under the Skin (1994, U of Pittsburgh Press, Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize)
Creative Nonfiction
- Terroir: Love, Out of Place, Trinity University Press, 2020.
Criticism
- Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (2014, University of Michigan Press)
