The Dark Length Home

4.8/5 ( ratings)

Poetry. Women's Studies. "THE DARK LENGTH HOME is the physical representation of pouring, nude, into a foamy sea during a storm while some siren whispers--breathy and wet--things about love and sex and sorrow and desire. The book blends the essence of a young girl's dreamy diary with the calculated sexual and emotional hunger of womanhood. Its obsessive dedication to location- as-character is what will trap you, but you will stay for the relationships, the confession, the sweat and the religion of both body and god. I rarely have *fun* reading a book, but I devoured this, feeling each grain of salt and every lick of table wine along the way. I wanted to know more, to feel what the speakers felt. I got lost in the vanishing act of the voices, and each time I picked it up again it was like I was transported. That's a power not often found in poetry. Read this book. Get lost."--Lisa Marie Basile

"In unison, spoken as one voice, one woman voicing many men, poets Anne Champion and Sarah Sweeney collect memories of passion that add up to elegant strength or rogue loneliness. Or both, because each of these lovely, lyrical poems asserts a fierce independence of speech and sway: 'being alone / is like being god.' The complicated truth here is that being a white American visitor in Puerto Rico carries tremendous privilege; but being an unmarried, childless woman brings questions and stares. This gorgeous voice resists both slut shaming and national anthems: 'I don't need anyone anymore. / When he presses me down, / it's the salt air that unpins my hair.'"--Carol Guess

"THE DARK LENGTH HOME is undoubtedly a force of a collection. Champion and Sweeney pull the reader into their hypnotic tide from the first page and never let go. We come to wonder with the honest and powerful narrator, 'Who am I if I don't need anyone at all?' Amidst the backdrop of Puerto Rico, the poems in this collection wrestle with gender, sexuality, and identity. Just when we think we understand, we only come to realize that we are all like the narrator in some ways, just 'a trail of smoke...exhaled out the window.'"--Jenny Sadre-Orafai