The Darks and the Lights by Sarah Stoltzfus Allen

Sarah Stoltzfus Allen’s The Darks and the Lights imbues the ordinary—the dust rag, the laundry, the drive to work—with expressive turns of phrase, rendering the mundane and familiar in innovative ways. Allen’s narratives counter sadness and loss with myth and music. “I can’t make any of this ethereal. / It’s not pretty,” writes the poet, but the observations and images in these poems offer a lyrical wisdom that can only be achieved through living the ugly-beautiful of life and coming out changed on the other side.

–Marianne Worthington, author of The Girl Singer, editor of Still: The Journal

Reading The Darks and the Lights is a journey inward – exploring the shadowy caves of fear and sorrow while also celebrating the brilliance of love and rock-hard commitment.

–Joyce Moyer Hostetter, author of Blue and other BAKERS MOUNTAIN STORIES

When I read Sarah’s poetry, I’m never awash in sentimentality. Instead, I’m surprised and enchanted. I want to read again. And I want to read more.

–Phyllis Miller Swartz, author of Yoder School.

In The Darks and the Lights Sarah Stoltzfus Allen radiates a blaze of earthy and earthly experience. Her truths move outward from a recollected fire: the lush and humble land explored and reported on as by a child, the body discovered and re-discovered by a mother. Allen brings the joy of thingness into a lyric talisman, love of what’s rural, the reassurances of the beloved and the self talking to the self. In one of the the final poems, masterful simplicity belies the levels of meaning towards the self, the child, and God:

Being with you is

the start of a green, curved path.

I don’t know the end,

but holding your hand, walking

unknown places, is enough.

–Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of Continuity