Hayden saunier
“In these lucid and intriguing elegies, at the cold heart of calamity, there is a calm. This calm, a kind of wisdom, does not so much console as teach us that in the face the tragic one cannot help, at least for some time, to remain inconsolable. You will find, in spite of what I have just said, that these poems are funny and humane, sharpened by Saunier’s razor-edged wit. She tunes these poems with a keen ear and perfected pitch for the music of the American language. This is a breathtaking and stunning debut.”
--Eric Pankey
“Tips for Domestic Travel, like any remarkable book, offers good company for the long distances we must travel. It helps us to face what must be faced.”
--Christopher Bursk
“Untitled” by Stirling Spadea
“ Tips for Domestic Travel is a lovely, funny, sad, unpretentious primer for living. Between its covers we discover a motherland where a woman making “Notes Towards an Ode to Bad Decisions” lists “running with vomiting child” and “growing pot in a field before learning it belongs/ to the Chief of Police” among the faux pas she hopes never to repeat; where groundhogs brilliantly outwit us; where a botched ham must be carved with a band saw, and where the vagaries of fate teach us that mourning and celebration are somehow one and the same.
--Amy Gerstler
copyright 2009 all rights reserved
