Sarah Wolfson
Book
Cover Art:
“Crossing the River”
by Dorothy Caldwell
A Common Name
for Everything
Green Writers Press
(2019)
“In her stunning first book of poems, A Common Name for Everything, Sarah Wolfson drives a team of spirited horses into rural landscapes, many of which she interiorizes figuratively in moving topical ways that are wonderfully strange. In one keenly intelligent, musical poem after another, Wolfson instills her lyrical narratives about motherhood, environmental crisis, the inherent elegy of words, natural history, and poetry itself with chthonic imagery, risible asides, empirical logic, and academic nomenclature. For her, poetry itself is 'the common name of everything,' and from her 'place' she serves her reader 'soup and small / theories of holiness' in evocatively specific, sublime ways. By writing from the ground and body up, Wolfson surprises herself first and then her reader with language that soars with verbal music.”
— Chard diNiord,
former Poet Laureate of Vermont
“Humane and full of wonder even as it resists all that is inflated by romanticism, A Common Name for Everything’s insistence on Earth’s ordinary orderings doesn’t efface the deep reverence the speaker has for the same.”
— Letitia Montgomery-Rogers,
Orion Magazine
"Wolfson’s world is kin to the essential ecological poetics of Brenda Hillman and Juliana Spahr, while questioning whether any sort of classification—be it linguistic, personal, or natural—is possible. What results is part doomsday projection, part playful tabula rasa, part wildlife conservancy, and part nuanced meditation on motherhood."
— Leslie Sainz,
West Branch
“The gorgeous surfaces of Sarah Wolfson’s work, the poet’s intelligence and curiosity and wit, are not ends in themselves, but a way to get at what seems essential in the self and the world.”
— Clare Rossini,
author of Winter Morning with Crow
"In A Common Name for Everything, Sarah Wolfson demonstrates, again and again, an entirely uncommon talent for precise and defamiliarizing observation. At times declarative and deceptively plain, and at others more fractured and gestural, the poems in this formidable first collection are informed by a lyric sensibility that is authentic, playful, and unflinchingly direct."
— Phillip Crymble,
Poetry Editor, The Fiddlehead and author of Not Even Laughter
Winner of the
2020 A.M. Klein Prize
for Poetry
Quebec Writers' Federation
“Wolfson’s debut collection bolts out, at once taut and roomy, leaving or making space for the reader to find or lose themself. The poems tiptoe through careful parcels of image, weaving domestic moments, nature poetry, occasionally almost spiritual meanderings. Wolfson is consciously poetic, but never belabours the moment, and manages to write about love and hunger in a way that embeds them in the concrete, the known. Rapid and ruminant, sensitive and incensed, the words in Wolfson’s book work together to understand the world, and involve the reader in this never-ending process. Wolfson maintains a thrilling confidence in what her fixations are.”
— A.M. Klein Prize Jury
(Katia Grubisic, Ben Ladouceur, Hoa Nguyen)
Reviews
of
A Common Name for Everything
Sainz, Leslie. “What Breaks Through: Four Collections on Awe.” West Branch, 19 May, 2021.
Viñas, Bianca. “A Review of A Common Name for Everything by Sarah Wolfson.” Hunger Mountain, 29 October, 2020.
Dennis, Laura. “A Common Name for Everything by Sarah Wolfson.” Mom Egg Review, 21 December 2019.
Montgomery-Rogers, Letitia. “A Common Name for Everything.” Orion Magazine, Winter 2019.