Lucky to Have You by Dr. Sarah Jefferis

If this poet’s face is “fragile like a bomb and an orchid” so too are her words and the world she draws for us in Lucky to Have You. It is a world where messages are beaten on the edge of a bed frame in “a morse code.” A world in which we are rooting for her from the beginning, drawn in by her storytelling, her beauty telling. In this world we learn not to forsake ourselves or the poet, a brave translator of grief, grit and becoming. Ultimately this is a journey that ends in power.

–Theta Pavis, author of The Red Strobe

Sarah Jefferis is the rare poet who is both unflinching in her truth-telling and exquisite in her metaphor. Lucky to Have You, is a beautiful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable collection that reads like a story— a story you devour in a single sitting. She mixes delightfully specific diction with brutally hard ideas.

–Dr. Anne Elrod Whitney, author of Inkwell and Teaching Writers to Reflect

The chant that recognizes, the chant that eschews, the oblique flow—and keep in mind “love never evaporates”—the stumble into a familiar morass, the seeing it through to the arrival at a greater reckoning: the one who survives can thrive. Sarah Jefferis writes of difficult interpersonal terrain, naming instead of silencing, pronouncing instead of renouncing. Images, metaphor, sequences—and surprising penultimate turns—code break familial angst, impoverishment, unconscionable abuse, religious trappings and real faith, anniversaries that trigger tenderness and bitterness. Fearless, fierce, these poems vocalize a way-back ancestry of women willing to follow risk into courage, and a mother’s riddle of learning from her daughters. Lucky To Have You is a transformative book, proof that luck—and life—and poetry—are what we assiduously make them.

–Mary Gilliland, author of The Devil’s Fools