Vivarium: Poems - Softcover

Poetry. A vivarium is an enclosure for living things—plants or animals—which might likewise be said of a poem. With a vivacious sensibility and unruly leaps from elegiac to ironic, Sajé's new book is an abecedarium, fully using the page, and challenging all manner of received wisdom. Employing lyrics, lists, arguments, narratives, and meditations, and including prose poems devoted to particular letters as well as invented visual or conceptual pieces, in VIVARIUM the alphabet is endowed with power far beyond usefulness. Form breathes life in this book, and the lived emotion of these poems defies death.

Natasha Saje's first book of poems, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and her second collection, BEND (Tupelo, 2004), was given the Utah Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of VIVARIUM: POEMS (Tupelo, 2014), and the book of essays Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (University of Michigan Press, 2014). She teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.