Dear Outsiders by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

I’m sure I’m not alone in believing the most wonderful place to be is between mountains and ocean, with both within reach. The poems in Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s latest collection Dear Outsiders (2023, University of Akron Press) reside exactly there, and they deliver on the promise of their setting. Dear Outsiders, a collection of prose poems, is the newest in the Akron Series in Poetry and rightfully takes its place among a prestigious list of predecessors. The poems are otherworldly and set the reader off-kilter with their shifting, strange imagery. The book is divided into two parts. The first takes place in a tourist seaside town, the realm of the speaker’s mother; the second, in the mountains, the homeland of the father. But the two parts connect in so many ways—the poems of both sections drip with familial love, deep connection with nature, and a blending of landscape/animal/human into one Ovid-like world. . .

Read the review in its entirety at The Rumpus here: https://therumpus.net/2023/10/04/jenny-sadre-orafai-2/