excerpt:
Sarah Arvio's Cry Back My Sea is a performance in the language of heartbreak and longing. In these poems Arvio, a translator of Federico Garcia Lorca, boasts his influence: simple language, first person, confessional. But what she does next is where her own mastery becomes evident. Using nothing but words, Arvio send out ripples of sounds and connotations that build up and pare down meaning into waves of sense and sensation…. The swelling of words crests, and the foam left on the surface sounds like a foreign language that, as it turns out, you understand fluently….
What fascinates me most, though, is the undertow, which gives this playful and poignant volume its strongest overall cohesion. This backward-looking impulse is a search for the unspoken…. These poems are a tour through the semantics of someone else's mind, masterfully crafted by the poet to require just enough translation to conjure not just the satisfaction of surprise, but the intimacy of discovery that goes along with love and heartbreak.
a rave from Richie Hofman (100 Lovers, Knopf 2022) in The Poet's Nightstand
Cry Back My Sea
by Sarah Arvio
Sarah Arvio’s newest book is a book of heartbreak. As the title of the collection suggests, these poems move with the crash and retreat of waves, dynamic and emotional, and they carry with them the salt and sting of seawater. As a reader, I was swept up in the tumult of these poems: erotic, precise, and devastating as they turn and turn back on themselves. As a writer, I wanted to put the book down and write—they so unlocked new worlds of idea and of feeling. Arvio’s poems urge me deeper into language—into its material—and remind me how fragile we are, everything is. Cry Back My Sea is so fresh and so original—I don’t anticipate I’ll ever be “finished” reading such a rich and forceful book.
https://poetrysociety.org/features/the-poets-nightstand/the-poets-nightstand-with-richie-hofmann
Cry Back My Sea in Booklist
…These poems are an ode to the heart, Even the waves in the subtitle are representative of phases in a love relationship, ….The intimate love described is at times all desire and physical affection, until it becomes disconnection or violence,... Arvio’s voice is witty and wise, candid and calculated. Although the poems can read like streams of consciousness, each is distinct, worthy, and shaped with skill and inventiveness.
— Janet St. John
An excerpt from Lorca's Dreamwalking Ballad will appear on Poetry Path--a project of Poets House & Battery Park City Authority
Poets House: 6 p.m. free
Celebrate 10 years of Poets House in Battery Park City with an installation of over 40 poems in a colorful, outdoor Poetry Path. Enjoy poems from many cultures that inspire, delight and reflect the power and beauty of language. Meet some of the poets, enjoy readings and light refreshments. All ages welcome!
from Dreamwalking Ballad, Federico García Lorca, from Poet in Spain, Knopf 2017
