I attended the Sarah Freligh reading at Literati Bookstore on Friday evening. Freligh recited poems from her newly-released and critically-acclaimed collection of poems entitled Sad Math. The collection won the Moon City Poetry Award last year.
Here is a review of Sad Math by author Mark Irwin: “Sarah Freligh’s Sad Math is nothing less than a marvelous arc that captures and explores what it means for all sentient beings to age and find the unreasonable sum of years. Her feminist view heightens the notion of sacred disfigurement as we realize that language can never properly add or assess our grief.” Ultimately, the poems within Sad Math assessed death, grief, and the past.
The atmosphere of the event was decidedly lighthearted. The poet seemed comfortable throughout the event despite the at-times gloomy nature of her poems. Freligh commented that some of her family members were seated in the audience. In-between readings Freligh would contextualize her poems with stories and various musings.
Near the beginning of the event she commented that she often mixes fictional elements with elements from her past. Indeed, many of Freligh’s poems concerned her past and her childhood, such as the characters involved in her high school memories. But not all poems concerned death and the past. For example, one poem humorously focused on her lovingly-depicted cat and elicited laughs from the audience. Additionally, the former-smoker often nostalgically featured smoking as a reoccurring motif within her poems.
Towards the end of the event Freligh mentioned that Garrison Keillor featured the poem, “What I’ve Lost,” on The Writer’s Almanac. Click here to read the written poem itself as well as to listen to the recording of Garrison Keillor reciting the poem.
