The Cure

In The Cure, Sarah Gorham's mature, eager, intelligent poetic voice explores family--and marriage; and self--as forms in which we move, escaping and demanding restraint, seeking and fearing contact with each other. The book moves toward and away from a riveting sequence, "The Family Afterward," that examines the intrusions and heartbreaks, complicities and narrowings of definition, that are forced upon the family members of an alcoholic. Gorham is interested in appetite: for drink, for sex, for oblivion, for comfort. The paradoxes she most thrillingly defines are the tightest ones, degrees and atmospheres apart. The Cure is both accessible and intimate; sometimes funny, sometimes desolate. Gorham describes a hike, the hiker coming upon a limestone cross, surrounded by the tchotchke-mementos of previous passers-by. She is flooded, but trusts the surprise of her emotion: "Very moving these rookie prayers/ This unmajestic gratitude." It's that delectable sensibility, the pause that yields finely tuned appreciation, that marks Gorham's vision, her cupped ear listening to the world.

SARAH GORHAM is the author of Don't Go Back to Sleep (1989) and The Tension Zone which was chosen by Heather McHugh as co-winner of the Four Way Books Award in Poetry (1996). Her poems have appeared widely in such places as The Nation, The Paris Review, Grand Street, Poetry, American Poetry Review, DoubleTake, Antaeus, and Poetry Northwest, where in 1990 she won the Carolyn Kizer Prize. In 2000, Prairie Schooner granted her its "Reader's Choice" Award, and in 2002, she and her husband Jeffrey Skinner were poets-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. Gorham is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sarabande Books, Inc. She resides in Louisville, Kentucky.