THE SHIVERING GROUND & OTHER STORIES » by Sara Barkat
The Shivering Ground blends future and past, earth and otherworldliness, in a magnetic collection that shimmers with art, philosophy, dance, film, and music at its heart.
A haunting medieval song in the mouth of a guard, an 1800s greatcoat on the shoulders of a playwright experiencing a quantum love affair, alien worlds both elsewhere and in the ruined water at our feet: these stories startle us with the richness and emptiness of what we absolutely know and simultaneously cannot pin into place.
The word “original,” as a compliment, is both overused and quite often misused. But sometimes it’s the only word that will do. Sara Barkat is an original. Her imagination is imperious; she wields words as she pleases, in ways that delight and unsettle. (In this she reminds me of Emily Dickinson.) Reading her, I expect you will agree. Don’t miss the opportunity.
—John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture (1995-2016)
[It] even made me put down the book for a while and feel for the characters which rarely happens even in a novel. So, that’s a huge win from the author’s side…
“—but merely remember your image, here, and this moment in which I saw something beyond perfection and imperfection.
Just as I read this, I recalled everything that I had written, but I knew that I had buried the letter in the sand, never to be found. Yet in its strange, formless, inexplicable way, I knew that she had answered me and written back, in a universe slightly akilter to this one.”
—from “A Universe Akilter”
“And for a moment you wondered if you were angry: you should be angry, you thought, because the water you had played in that had been so blue as a child was covered in silt and piles of strange items, like shipwrecks of trash, and in and among them were the corpses of the mermaids that had once sung you to sleep. Perhaps you should be angry, because your friend had never said anything about the way their feet turned backward more and more every time, had only stared out and laughing had listened to your small and fragile stories.”
—from “The Eternal In-Between”
“The mannequin with my heart in it stands in the corner, dusty. It has been that way for years. In the early days I would try futilely to dust round it, and when the feathers on the duster, my thin appendage, dragged across that cold aluminum collarbone and the plume of dust leapt up in answer, it would hover, bombinating, susurrating, droning…nothing but flecks of dust, thin-sharded and shining, mica and talc. I got tired of that dust, and the way the windowpane beyond it reeked of grime, and the way I never had to stand on tiptoe or crouch—the mannequin with its knobbed spine and the crooked jaunty tilt of its ear, circles upon circles of insets swirled within brass was always exactly my height. It did not have my hair. It did not, really, have even my shape, but its eyes were like mine, only flat and as completely lifeless as anything can give impression of being.”
—from “The Mannequin”
Sara Barkat is an intaglio artist and writer with an educational background in philosophy and psychology, whose work has appeared in Every Day Poems, Tweetspeak Poetry, and Poetic Earth Month—as well as in the book How to Write a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem “Introduction to Poetry.” Sara has served as an editor on a number of titles including the popular The Teacher Diaries: Romeo & Juliet, and is the illustrator of The Yellow Wall-Paper Graphic Novel, an adaptation of the classic story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; as well as being the writer & illustrator of The Midnight Ball, a story for children.
The word “original,” as a compliment, is both overused and quite often misused. But sometimes it’s the only word that will do. Sara Barkat is an original. Her imagination is imperious; she wields words as she pleases, in ways that delight and unsettle. (In this she reminds me of Emily Dickinson.) Reading her, I expect you will agree. Don’t miss the opportunity.
