Little Human Things

The poems in Sarah Etlinger’s Little Human Things scour heaven and earth for the redeemed and the unredeemable, the ordained and the unlikely, the present and the vanishing. They balance on a knife-edge between eros and grief, as they ask the important questions of human existence– What do we call / the things we can’t have / but our bodies know…the gathering of sighs / or the kinetic hopes of fingers… Through letters, elegies, memories, and direct addresses to the beloved, Etlinger plumbs the depths of both the sacral and the carnal, and offers intimate details of the domestic milieu–and in her hands it is a freshly invented landscape. Little Human Things is a big-hearted, keen-souled book from a promising poet. Mark Wagenaar, Author of Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining and winner of the 2018 Frontier Poetry Prize