Only hour only thought: speech speechTell it juice heft and slantWarily amuse once againSome futuricity to sayOther word other anger other other Between them, a footprint the size of ManhattanUnderscore the elements maybe A furry designer into deerWake into a glancing dream, do I?Frontier main into malleableWalk on a planet that melts, movesThought to assemble a few continentsHow to, the lanes toward disasterHard to find a place to stepSpeak speak, breasts, what the mouth doesn’t knowFive tracks toward a stigmatismOtherwise a crossing over now’s To the skin hard crossWhat were so so soQuickly into chaos, millions goThe thing I meant to tell you I am in a constant state of forgettingHow to drum up the collective energyCan you start hoarsely Forgiving the moment into secondDeranged colors of rage and other elementsWhat you sacrifice to tellA toss-up suddenly revealedIt was a wish understandingA nerve, hit, truth a what’s itAngle into artery, a coursing wish listCan you derange or angleIn a positive how many negatives again?Sails warping into butterflyA cost made up of soulIf they could agree, the skyTelling again & again You, a wish for cathedral, touch
Feature Date
- June 30, 2025
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
Selected By
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“November 14” from Lines by Sarah Riggs.
Published by Winter Editions on May 06, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Riggs.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

Malvika Jolly
Sarah Riggs is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn. She received the 1913 Poetry Prize for her book Pomme & Granite and her translation of Etel Adnan’s Time won the Griffin International Prize and Best Translated Book Award. Word Sightings, her essays on the impact of visual media on US poetry, was published by Routledge. With her partner Omar Berrada, Riggs runs Tamaas, an intercultural arts organization focusing on translation, film and education, and co-edited Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets (Litmus). Written during the 2016-20 Trump presidency, along with The Nerve Epistle (Roof), Lines is her eighth book of poems.
Sarah Riggs’s eighth book of poems pulls from the momentum of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Bernadette Mayer’s Memory to create a survival manual for a Trump presidency and a family crisis.
Riggs’s book-length poetry cycle begins with 47-line poems (corresponding to the author’s age) and breaks its form as it builds, riding on association and assonance. Lines seeks to turn colonial power & patriarchy on its head through the movements of the mind and the sanity of poetry.
“In Lines, rows of text gather meaning as they go, creating a dizzying, chromatic accumulation. Riggs’s language games challenge the reader to explore a type of refractive logic; each daily poem becomes kaleidoscopic, a testament to the way Time stutters, collapses and expands.” — J. Mae Barizo
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