What happens when love is replaced by romance? In\u00a0Nothing Fatal<\/i>, Sarah Perrier explores this and other questions about our contemporary understanding of dating, relationships, sex, and marriage. In the opening lines of “Too Darn Hot,” a poem fueled by the same weary ardor as Cole Porter’s song, the speaker asks, “Why sort the doubletalk from the innuendo? \/ They’re both lyrical.” Rather than sorting the one from the other, the poems of\u00a0Nothing Fatal<\/i>\u00a0delight in the ways that the imperfect and seductive power of language has, for centuries, helped us find new and inventive ways to woo one another.\u00a0Nothing Fatal<\/i>\u00a0also acknowledges that while love is itself a creative act, sometimes the things we create can appear, like Frankenstein’s monster, to be an unexpected mess. Perrier delivers a collection that is at once wise, sly, sexy, and sad. These poems are clearly in favor of love, and yet they also reveal how, through imprecision of language and desire for romantic gestures at once nostalgic and entirely new, we create a kind of comedy from our courting of one another.<\/p>\n
Reading\u00a0<\/i>Nothing Fatal\u00a0is like taking time off from your humdrum life. It\u2019s like slipping on a black dress and going out on the town on a sultry summer night. It\u2019s like telling all your best-kept secrets to the night air or a long-lost friend. It\u2019s like sipping glass after glass of the finest French wine. It\u2019s like pages of laughter, music, dance. It\u2019s like erotic jazz. It\u2019s like melodic magic. It\u2019s like illegal bliss.<\/i>\u00a0Nothing Fatal\u00a0is poetry at its best.<\/i>
\n\u2014Nin Andrews<\/b>
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Perrier\u2019s sassy, sad, unapologetic voice wins the reader over and reminds us why her materials are among the age-old materials of poetry. Who isn\u2019t ready to give love (and the love poem) another shot when the right voice beckons?<\/i>
\n\u2014Dora Malech<\/b><\/p>\n
If Sarah Perrier is a sly cross between Dickinson and the next bolt of lightning, then<\/i>\u00a0Nothing Fatal is a jolt to the heart divided. These poems reconfigure the currents of our own dazed, often lonely, often vulnerable condition, embodied in first kisses and near misses, sexy French underwear and the myths of love and domestic bliss. It is hard to think of a recent poet whose voice is as acrobatic and coolly electric, whose poems are so darkly lit with irony and blazingly sincere. Sophisticated and sensuous. Full of wit and fully-charged. When one of Perrier\u2019s flirty narrators insists, \u201cI know you so well your body \/ has scars \/ I have \/ yet to cause,\u201d I, for one, am listening.<\/i>
\n\u2014Matthew Guenette<\/b><\/p>\nAbout the author<\/h3>\n