Sarah Pinder

Finalist: 2018 Lambda Award, Lesbian Poetry

Common Place explores the stories of shifting, resilient bodies and landscapes bound by systems of capital and power. From thin threads of text messages across borders to encounters with strangers in the crush of rush-hour transit, Sarah Pinder names our most private and public moments of seeing and being seen. With considered, quiet urgency, this poem witnesses our ambiguous, aching present and looks toward what comes next.

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‘Pinder switches lanes smoothly, moving between controlled understatement and intense moments of lyricism.’
– Globe and Mail

‘Common Place feels like the logbook of a survivor, one that shows how the intimate and the idiosyncratic persist within the post-capitalist technosphere. A tattered record keeping, Common Place is friend of the abject landscape, “home of the lesser, lowercase subject.” Grasp its compassionate disposition, and this fragmentary poem reveals the affective centre of its ingeniously dissociative fabric.’
– Sue Sinclair, author of Heaven’s Thieves

Cutting Room both describes and pushes against the anxious hum of the technologically saturated present. Sarah Pinder's poems navigate domestic and 'natural' spaces as landscapes charged with possible violence and desire. Using hyper-focus and the long gaze, they draw the eye to the corners and seams of these spaces, slowing us down, shifting our focus to worn detail, asking us to seek pattern and possibility in a hyper-paced present tense. These are little ominous films, documenting the minutiae around us that can be our undoing.

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‘I can’t tell whether these poems are glass or shatterproof glass. They’re delicate, clear, tough, opaque, breakable. Sarah Pinder makes everything new.’

— Roo Borson, author of Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida