Sarah Maclay is a poet, performer, essayist and educator.

Her new book is now out.

“She uses words like Helen Frankenthaler paints. An enticing and earthly sensuousness, a seering intellect, and deep passion inform her vision.”

—Harry Northup, poet, actor, publisher & reading host

“Breathtaking . . . a salve for the soul.” —Larkin Higgins, poet, artist & professor emerita

“Stunningly, shockingly, surprisingly European and sophisticated, capable of very fine distinctions that lead us to wonderfully painful situations, the poems have an unusual Modernist stance.” —Arthur Vogelsang, poet, educator, longtime editor

“The sea is dangerous, they say, but not if
you’re the sea.”

—“Ocean in White Chair”

Readings

12.08

Beyond Baroque
Venice, CA

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1.12

Chevalier’s
Larchmont Blvd., LA, CA

With Cynthia Hogue, Tennison Black, William Archila

1.26

Beyond Baroque
Venice, CA

A Poetry International Celebration

3.22

Beyond Baroque
Venice, CA

with Piotr Florczyk

10.25

The Village Well
Culver City, CA

What Books Press 2023 Releases!

11.19

Online: Ceclia Woloch & Friends
with Gail Wronsky

Click here to RSVP for Zoom Link

Nightfall Marginalia - Out Now

A book of nocturnes and ekphrastics, the poem of the dream and the poem as dream, Nightfall Marginalia abandons diurnal constraints . . . Twilit, autumnal, narrowly perched between eros and elegy, prayer and grimoire, here, the tangible—the sensate—becomes an entrance even to barely perceptible mystery. Evocative, intricate, reverent and gorgeous and newly strange, these poems mark a new level of accomplishment for poet Sarah Maclay.

“Sarah Maclay’s dream-voice hums with the energy of heart-body desire and cleanses with the fineness of an excellent mind. These new poems feel gathered from the margins of a night continuously falling, shaped by an intimate twilit voice, starred with mythic images, that speak-sings in many registers. A narrative emerges, centering in a feminine figure both unique and representative of a city and a time. Yet there is no self-mythologizing here. Rather, the poet’s voice discovers itself already in a mythic role in the here and now.”

—James Cushing

Advance Praise

“Reading the lush, lyric poems of Sarah Maclay’s stunning new collection, I dwelt for a time in the fair house of possibility. Nightfall Marginalia hovers between the desire for sanctuary, relation, and love—a longing for ‘the joined cathedral of our twinned hearts’—and something more aesthetically elusive, what one speaker has ‘come to recognize as prayer.’ Maclay’s poetry brims with such an exquisite sense of beauty and truth that I hushed in the end with awe. “

—Cynthia Hogue

“Strange as it may seem, sensuality—genuine sensuality—is our one sure access to an honest humility. Color humbles us. Touch chastens us. With a fine artist’s humility (I think of Pierre Bonnard continuing to touch up his paintings on the French museum walls), Sarah Maclay sustains a careful and even reverent contact with the objects and surfaces of our world. The results go far, far beyond mere description. These poems gathered as Nightfall Marginalia amplify the available light and the colors of life, enriching us as we read.”

—Donald Revell

“Finding beauty at the frayed edges of a collapsing world, Maclay’s Nightfall Marginalia is a voluptuous enactment of both a ruminative intuition and an exuberant intelligence. A place to revel, where the fruit is heavy on the vine, each line a velvet cloak to be pulled up—to reveal the mysteries of desire, mortality, the nature(s) of consciousness itself. Blissfully, there are no easy answers here, just a deepening of the questions. One of contemporary poetry’s most compelling sensualists, this is Maclay at the height of her bewitching powers.”

—Louise Mathias