Quicksand by S. J. Stephens

“S. J. Stephens is a stunning and beautifully imaginative and passionate poet. In her poems we encounter a speaker who is an uncanny observer of the awareness of her own experience and its richness and complexity. She writes fearlessly about both physical and emotional pain and other arguably—if you will, “impossible” subject matters such as romantic love and loss and death.  She writes with a lyrical intensity and with what occasionally becomes an almost vortex like syntax infused with a rare energy and momentum bordering even occasionally on a vivid surrealism. Yet, and I don’t know how she does it, her poems are down to earth, they are grounded in the natural world of North Carolina as well as her native Ohio. Considering her poems, I think again of what Blake said about the imagination: “The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”

–Malena Mörling, Professor of Creative Writing at UNCW, Author, Ocean Avenue and Astoria

In the collection Quicksand, S. J. Stephens travels the divide between desire and love, connection and brokenness, doubt and belief. In “All These Verbs to Catch an End,” Stephens shares this thought: “we/arrest all this unrest among us.” This collection of poems arrests the unrest that is the reality of our lives, our lived experiences. From the “social media quicksand” to the “sting of expectations” and “misspent regrets,” the speaker in these poems searches for connection and power in a world that seems to so often leave one feeling alone. Stephens writes “we swell with the need to be plucked/and loved well.” At the heart of this collection is desire—for love, for physical connection, for a sense of belonging.

–Jill Gerard, Editor, Chautauqua, Author, Something Yet Unseen