{"id":6069,"date":"2022-09-19T09:08:03","date_gmt":"2022-09-19T13:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/?post_type=product&p=6069"},"modified":"2025-03-11T14:51:29","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T18:51:29","slug":"dear-outsiders","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/product\/dear-outsiders\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear Outsiders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear<\/span><\/span>\u202f<\/span><\/span>Outsiders<\/span><\/span><\/em>\u202f<\/span><\/span>explores how we are part of and stranger to our environments and to our families and how identities form by where and who we come from. Told through two siblings’ perspectives of the loss of their parents, the book is a map of isolation, longing, and what it means to be deserted and alive.\u00a0<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

About the Author<\/h2>\n

Sadre-Orafai is an Iranian Mexican American poet and writer. She is the co-author of <\/span>Book of Levitations <\/i><\/span>and the author of<\/span> Malak<\/i><\/span> and<\/span> Paper, Cotton, Leather<\/i><\/span>. Her poetry has appeared in <\/span>Cream City Review<\/i><\/span>, <\/span>Ninth Letter<\/i><\/span>, <\/span>The Cortland Review<\/i><\/span>, and <\/span>Hotel Amerika<\/i><\/span>. Her prose has appeared in <\/span>VIDA Review<\/i><\/span>, <\/span>Fourteen Hills<\/i><\/span>, and T<\/span>he Los Angeles Review<\/i><\/span>. She co-founded <\/span>Josephine Quarterly <\/i><\/span>and teaches creative writing at Kennesaw State University.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Praise for Dear Outsiders<\/em><\/h2>\n

Dear Outsiders <\/span><\/i>allows<\/span> readers to wade into a world where maps become menus, a father\u2019s face is a cliff, and a mother\u2019s fingernails are circus peanuts. Written like a tender address to those who dwell on the periphery, Jenny Sadre-Orafai offers an accumulation of negations while questioning the unknown: ‘What\u2019s the man\u2019s name who names the storms?’ Using both minor and major sensory details, Sadre-Orafai provides a topographical color theory of objects that can only be perceived with the shrewd eyes of a poet\u2014the blue versus orange beach towels, the two red plastic shovels, a yellow gold chain, a stack of pink roses, pawpaw, pigweed, and the mud that smells like dead eggs. <\/span>Dear Outsiders<\/span><\/i> is a book that you will pull into your chest like ‘the thread, the net, the warning’ that ‘our home is a snake with pulled teeth.’ Even though, as Sadre-Orafai writes, ‘water isn\u2019t easy to read,’ reading or rather swimming through this book might be what saves you. I was willing to become ‘even more animal’ spending time with these poems. Are you?<\/span>
\n<\/span>\u2014Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes<\/i><\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jenny Sadre-Orafai\u2019s <\/span>Dear Outsiders<\/span><\/i> is a lamentation, an intimate catalogue, an off-script map that mimes the chaotic regularity of the big, wide sea. In their evocative, ecocritical attention to seaside outsiders, townies, and tourists, these interlocking vignettes prompt readers to relearn the language of landscape, love, and, relatedly, the impermanent cadence of our existence. Here the mysteriousness of nature lives within the details of the human body, in the intricacies of our most intimate relationships across time. While reading, I felt I embarked on a deep, urgent journey with Sadre-Orafai\u2014one that provokes an estrangement from symptoms of our everyday inattention, one that lays achingly bare all that we take for granted on this finite Earth.<\/span>
\n<\/span>\u2014Jessica Q. Stark, author of Savage Pageant <\/i>and Buffalo Girl<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

With crystalline precision, Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s <\/span>Dear Outsiders <\/span><\/i>immerses us in the dream-logic of childhood. A strange, surreal plunge into underwater domesticity, orphanhood, and grief, Sadre-Orafai’s lyric prose is a tidal force, weaving a syntax that pushes and pulls the reader through the terror of absence and estrangement. Spoken through a plural first-person we, Sadre-Orafai invents a grammar of connected memory and collective loss, the act of remembering itself a fugue state in which the undertow of grief “is the rip that sweeps bodies under and into [our chests].” A singular, haunting collection.<\/span>
\n<\/span>\u2014Vanessa Ang\u00e9lica Villareal, author of Beast Meridian<\/i>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Media<\/h2>\n

Listen to “Here, in the Summer”<\/a> on\u00a0The Indianapolis Review<\/em><\/p>\n

Spring 2023 Poetry Announcement in Publishers Weekly<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Review in\u00a0The Poetry Question<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Review in Harriet Books<\/a><\/p>\n

Review in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Bookshelf<\/a><\/em> “Prose Poems Chart Loss, Alienation in Dear Outsiders”<\/p>\n

Interview in Farsickness<\/a><\/p>\n

Interview at The Creative Independent<\/a><\/p>\n

Review in The Rumpus<\/a><\/p>\n

Review<\/a> in Sundress Publications’ Sundress Reads<\/p>\n

“Reading Sadre-Orafai\u2019s prose poems is like peering into a room through a cracked door, discovering what\u2019s inside only by what a single strip of light illuminates.”\u2014Maria Zoccola, Electric Lit<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jenny Sadre-Orafai<\/h3>\n
\n

Editor’s Choice\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Size: 6 x 9<\/p>\n

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