Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here

From its vividly drawn, lyrically rich title poem to its digitally coded dialogues, Sara Marron's dynamic and masterful nothing you build here, belongs here rails against the futility of urban living, wails against societal inequalities, and clutches its loved ones close amidst viral fears. A rush of vibrant imagery, this book skilfully counterbalances luxuriant elegiac language choices ("My Mountains Could Care Less About You") with clipped syntax ("Clorox, Wellbutrin"), adept experimentation with form (throughout), and razor-sharp observation ("Applying for EBT in California"). Embodying a compelling urge to summon our shared humanity, this is an urgent and vital book of, and for, our time.

-Anne Casey, Author of out of emptied cups (Salmon Poetry)

"As if the heat is a thing / you can hide from," Sara Cahill Marron writes in "My Mountains Could Care Less About You." She draws a portrait of a world tottering, laid low by COVID-19 in particular, but also by our political fragmentation and by our laying waste to the environment, one in which Styrofoam cups are thoughtlessly discarded next to grand art-Rodin ("Chick-fil-A Styrofoam cups / dance semi-circles between feet"). Echoes of Yeats, Whitman, and Tennyson, but also experimental language are threaded through Cahill Marron's collection. "Kiss10100love" the screen on her device says, despite the headlines. At first, this seems a cutely romantic but somewhat bewildered Apple product. But then, she carefully warns us, "Some will die."

-Susana H. Case, Author of Dead Shark on the N Train (Broadstone Books)

Reading Sara Cahill Marron leads me on a voyage of lyrical bliss, a song-filled walking through a landscape filled, however, with fallen trees, buildings, and people of a world devastated by plague. "Nothing you build here belongs here," she declares, and yet we have these beautiful verbal dwellings, written by a devotee to perfecting the harmony of sound and sense. Readers, you are witnesses here to the growth of an essential lyric poet, one we will read and learn from as we walk with her into the uncertain dark, healed by her word music, keeping contagions at bay.

-Indran Amirthanayagam, Author of The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press)