Sandra Beasley

Describes the impact of the author's food allergies on her childhood while tracing the cultural history of food allergies, relating such experiences as her short-lived job as a restaurant reviewer and dates that ended in trips to the emergency room.

Tales from an Allergic Life

Don't Kill the Birthday Girl

A collection of poems from Sandra Beasley, an essayist and periodic contributor to the Washington Post Magazine and the winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, awarded for the best second collection of poems by an American woman poet.

I Was the Jukebox: Poems

"With lacerating honesty, technical mastery, and abiding compassion, Made to Explode offers volatile poems for our volatile times. In her fourth collection, acclaimed poet Sandra Beasley interrogates the landscapes of her life. She probes memories of growing up in Virginia, in Thomas Jefferson's shadow, where liberal affluence obscured and perpetuated racist aggressions, but where the poet was simultaneously steeped in the cultural traditions of the American south. Her home in Washington, DC, inspires prose poems documenting and critiquing our capital's institutions and monuments, and a stirring suite explores Beasley's affiliation with the disabled community. Bold and intimate, Made to Explode untangles the poet's roots and seeks out resonance in society writ large"--

Poems

Made to Explode

“Beasley uses humor and surprise like a scythe, cutting to the root of a matter.”—Washington Post In Count the Waves, Sandra Beasley turns her eclectic imagination to the heart's pursuits. A man and a woman sit at the same dinner table, an ocean of worry separating them. An iceberg sets out to dance. A sword swallower ponders his dating prospects. "The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts," the poet observes in "Ukulele." "No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. / No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage." Beasley's voice is pithy and playful, with a ferocious intelligence that invites comparison to both Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker. In one of six signature sestinas, she warns, "You must not use a house to build a home, / and never look for poetry in poems." The collection’s centerpiece is a haunting sequence that engages The Traveler's Vade Mecum, an 1853 compendium of phrases for use by mail, telegraph, or the enigmatic “Instantaneous Letter Writer." Assembled over ten years and thousands of miles, these poems illuminate how intimacy is lost and gained during our travels. Decisive, funny, and as compassionate as she is merciless, Beasley is a reckoning force on the page.

Count the Waves: Poems

With lacerating honesty, technical mastery, and abiding compassion, Made to Explode offers volatile poems for our volatile times. In her fourth collection, acclaimed poet Sandra Beasley interrogates the landscapes of her life in decisive, fearless, and precise poems that fuse intimacy and intensity. She probes memories of growing up in Virginia, in Thomas Jefferson’s shadow, where liberal affluence obscured and perpetuated racist aggressions, but where the poet was simultaneously steeped in the cultural traditions of the American South. Her home in Washington, DC, inspires prose poems documenting and critiquing our capital’s institutions and monuments. In these poems, Ruth Bader Ginsberg shows up at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre’s show of Kiss Me Kate; Albert Einstein is memorialized on Constitution Avenue, yet was denied clearance for the Manhattan Project; as temperatures cool, a rain of spiders drops from the dome of the Jefferson Memorial. A stirring suite explores Beasley’s affiliation with the disability community and her frustration with the ways society codes disability as inferiority. Quintessentially American and painfully timely, these poems examine legacies of racism and whiteness, the shadow of monuments to a world we are unmaking, and the privileges the poet is working to untangle. Made to Explode boldly reckons with Beasley’s roots and seeks out resonance in society writ large.

Sandra Beasley

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