The poems in Sara London’s Upkeep offer a guidebook for both coping with and negotiating the difficult terrain of life after great personal loss. In the book’s opening section, the speaker explains to a Martian the ways we earthlings attempt to raise our dead—“you’ll find that with dreams // we exhume our dead without the mess /of upturned dirt”—and later finds comfort in objects that connect her to her late Mr. Fix-It father. These are elegies whose solemnity has been upended by humor and the nuanced interrogations of the daily rituals that heal us. “How do you / do it, start the experiment— / gas up, each day, anew?” she asks. Oatmeal and duct tape help, London suggests, but ultimately the heart decides: The “old tubes, they play on.”

Sara London is also the author of The Tyranny of Milk (Four Way Books). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Common, Quarterly West, Cortland Review, the Hudson Review, Poetry East, the Iowa Review, and the Poetry Daily anthology. She teaches at Smith College, and has also taught at Mount Holyoke and Amherst colleges. Sara grew up in California and Vermont, attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and lived for many years in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Also the author of two children’s books, she is the poetry editor at the Woven Tale Press magazine. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

— The New England Poetry Club