The Living Method by Sara Nicholson

  The poems in Sara Nicholson’s The Living Method imaginatively grasp the raw materials of nature, calling the reader to the “outer limits of the dark,” where one notices the music of the woods and gardens while searching for “the youngest photo of the night.” These poems explore and create various orders of images, a mysterious taxonomy of words and scraps of phrases that revive what in lesser hands would remain dying metaphors. Here, in her debut collection, a new and singular poetic logic reveals itself, growing tenderly out of the “droning chamber” of the poet’s throat, through Google image searches, and from the rich soil of archaic landscapes. “Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky claimed, ‘Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.’ Sara Nicholson makes poems with her hippocampus, that somewhat mysterious part of the brain that deals with memory and spatial recognition in ways we have yet to understand conclusively. Her poems speak to us directl