ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Two Signatures, Sara Ellen Fowler initiates her readers into a synesthetic contract of close attention and deep feeling. From the wood floor of an art museum buckling with Lake Michigan moisture, to the mud-packed hooves of the horse of childhood, to an art student’s spit on a pane of mirrored glass, the poems’ images string together a necklace of exquisite longing. Pleasures and complexities of sensory experience lay the ground for a world where risk is rewarded and candor is sensual. The poet explores registers of desire and power, drawing upon her training as a visual artist to make a studio of language. Temperature and texture gain grammar as the poems reach toward awe via multivalent psychology, sex, and sculptural interventions. These poems invite readers to explore the vulnerability and insistence that mark one’s devotion to any creative practice.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sara Ellen Fowler is a writer, artist, and educator living in California. Her writing has appeared in The Offing, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, Interim, and Gigantic Sequins, among others. Her work has been supported by The Frost Place, the Ashbery Home School, and Community of Writers. In 2023, she was awarded a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. Sara holds a BFA in Sculpture from Art Center College of Design and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside.

REVIEWS

Declaring to 'believe in the horizon only,' Sara Ellen Fowler in this extraordinary debut continually looks outward, looks at the spaces in between—the spaces both perceived and beyond our grasp. In stunning lyrics that are both eclogue and elegy, that are built from barrel races, FFA jackets, and brushfires leaping the lanes of freeway, Fowler engages a poetics of natural and supernatural means. But 'could language be altar enough'? Working in portraiture, in plein air, in ekphrasis, Fowler finds solace somewhere between the visual and the verbal, finds sustenance and beauty—poem after gorgeous poem—within attentive and exquisite forms where even the horse’s hoof holds the 'private archive of the ride.'”—Brandon Som, author of Tripas

"In language carried on air, in the cellular material of generations, each poem in Two Signatures traces its source invisibly across the spine of another. The poems work inside the body with an explicit sensual, grave, and rare haunting. They settle inside first like a bridge from one life to the next but soon as a fractured web of one life to the many and the many to the impossible count. The poems piece back from their hard light the scattered, the unspooled, the untethered and the strange, taking incident and moment into a terrible, godly reunion."—Asher Hartman, artist and theater maker

"The images and questions presented in Two Signatures will haunt you in the best way. Fowler is a genius at articulating the mysterious experience of being a body among other bodies—what it means to touch, to be touched, to be pulled apart by the world around us. These poems challenge the borders and boundaries of language, invoking moments of transcendence in vignettes of horses, fields, and lovers. This collection speaks in a voice both idiosyncratic and beautiful as we witness the interior landscapes of a curious and longing mind unfold before us."—Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, author of I Don't Want to Be Understood

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents:

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