Versioning Sappho Versioning is a collaboration with Sappho’s twenty-two-word poem, Fragment 86. Through poems, prose and images, Sarah Passino wrings out questions about subjects and empire from this old bit of language. The books asks how to name the bodies our bodies are inside, how the lyric might be used to listen as well as to sing. If the work of poetry is to refuse the trivialization of life everywhere around us, to find the blur at the heart of hierarchies and tip them toward freedom, this collection keeps pressing toward resilience and asking what new possibilities can be made.
“Loss of many kinds haunts Passino’s beautiful, subtly afflicted word compositions, lively as fireflies in a dark meadow. Sappho’s irremediable fragmentation has put her everywhere and nowhere. Passino infuses the power of that material contradiction into a three-part invention — a seriously, gently playful vortex of “versionings.” Apt word for what all translation actually is.” —Joan Retallack
Sarah Passino has work in or forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, DIAGRAM, Berkeley Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, Poetry Daily, Boston Review’s What Nature, Wendy’s Subway’s Capital and Ritual, Company Gallery and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Poet’s House, The Center for Book Arts, and by the 92nd Street Y’s Rachel Wetzsteon Poetry Prize.
