This Bright Darkness

Exquisite craft and strikingly tender aesthetics merge brilliantly with the urgency of complex gender politics in Sarah McKinstry-Brown’ s This Bright Darkness. While many of the poems in the collection reach back in time and mythology, the book could not be more essential and more poignant than it is right at this moment.McKinstry-Brown writes of a time “ when a mother is told over and over/ that her daughter is just another/ siren, warning, a story to be taught.” And isn’ t this time now? And how desperately we need these poems to teach us to know what is at stake. - Stacey Waite

Winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize and two Nebraska Book Awards, Sarah McKinstry-Brown is the author of Cradling Monsoons (Blue Light Press, 2010), and This Bright Darkness (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). Sarah’ s been published everywhere from West Virginia’ s standardized tests to literary journals such as Rattle, Green Mountains Review, Ruminate, The South Dakota Review, Sugar House Review, and Smartish Pace. Sarah teaches at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and is the recipient of two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council as well as a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.