The Green Lives

Sara Gilmore

It’s a month, a year. Wander, tramp, escape, trespass: people have every reason under the sun—and no reason at all. In new syntax and a fitful sense of the poetic line, The Green Lives finds joy in paradoxes from which felt sense can expand. It opens in familiar signs (safehouse, railroad, dog) that are made strange in their service to warn or welcome. In its turn, a reversal of place emerges where no marker will be left: an example of yellow petals, a thousand miles of strip malls, air filling with dust, glitter, and sulfur. Ever receptive to beautiful intrusion, so fast, Gilmore reckons with the infinite.

Sara Gilmore’s poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Ugly Duckling Presse’s Second Factory and 6x6, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere, and her work has been supported by an Iowa Arts Fellowship and Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Iowa. She lived for seventeen years in Seville, Spain, and now lives in Iowa City with her young son. She has worked extensively on translating the work of Antonio Gamoneda.