Praise for VIA COMBUSTA
“Every poem in Sara Fetherolf ‘s incantatory debut collection Via Combusta is a keeper. Here is a hard-won wisdom, tempered by both pain and truth, and distilled from a life spent ‘jumping from cage to cage’ in search of home. ‘I left day-old loaves at crossroads on the new moon, praying hard for an out, an ending, for uncross me uncross me uncross me—’ Ultimately the magic Fetherolf unearths is the simple everyday resilience of the human soul, ‘to not flinch when [the monster] looks you in the eye.’ Via Combusta charms as it testifies.”
— AMY QUAN BARRY
author of Water Puppets and Asylum
“Be mouth, the speaker of Sara Fetherolf’s haunting Via Combusta commands: talk back, tell how. By turns incantatory and plainspoken, these poems sing, pray, curse, chant, praise, petition, cast spells and conjure an unsettling world in which danger is never far off, where hunting guns hum in a locked closet and Remember is the name of a monster. This is a remarkable debut collection in which survival is hard won—and always conditional.”
— DONNA MASINI
author of 4:30 Movie
SARA FETHEROLF is a poet, essayist, librettist, storyteller & witch. They were born in Southern California, raised in Tornado Country, and came of age amidst the back roads and abandoned factories of western New Jersey. Their debut work of short fiction, “The Place,” won the Iron Horse Long Story award. They have an MFA degree in poetry from Hunter College, and are currently a Dornsife Fellow in the PhD for Literature and Creative Writing at University of Southern California. They live in Long Beach, next to a well-worn stretch of the Pacific Ocean.
