Reviews
Review by: Lisa Zimmerman, author of THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF EVERYTHING and SAINTED - December 27, 2025
"Sarah Carey's second collection opens the vein of her life to take inventory of what is given, what is lost, and what is shared. 'My words, my tongue, my tone, are never mine alone,' her speaker tells us. In BLOODSTREAM the poems move 'through history handed down,' and gaze unflinchingly at family tragedies and with eyes of love on all that remains--the dogs, the sisters, the beloved, the water and trees of Florida, to find 'that heart beside my own bud heart, / from which all new leaves come.'"
Review by: Sean Sexton, author of PORTALS and MAY DARKNESS - December 27, 2025
"Blood and wonder run through Sarah Carey's tender, self-effacing second volume of poetry where loss plays its upper hand with love in a discourse that begins with the query: Who were we when others couldn't see? The question propels us through incidentals of existence: aging, the demise of parents, and one's own procession through the poles of being. There's a strange and fortuitous literary underpinning of science in this voice, enlivening, and deepening eloquent language of the author's self-given task: how to discern nature vs. nurture comprising her journey--to the yet unlocated land of oneself."
Review by: Sally Rosen Kindred, author of WHERE THE WOLF - December 27, 2025
"With a keen lyric longing and a voice that blends tenderness and candor, the poems of Sarah Carey's BLOODSTREAM ponder lineage, the who and how of one woman's becoming. These poems roam the complex embodied experiences of touching a healing horse, trying on a dead mother's bodysuit to find it does not fit, and entering the breath 'that knows just how far back, how deep to go.' They explore perception in the context of aging, memory, discovery and desire, love and grief. Carey's work asks what it means to witness the world through the life and lens of a woman artist, revealing tensions between creator and creation, seen and unseen, telling and untold, the 'artist overlooking the Maine meadow' and 'the woman overlooked.' Self-portraits invoke the speaker as a longleaf pine who will 'draw breath from toes to gut, lungs to throat, all the way up,' and as a royal palm whose 'roots…reach deep enough to threaten a foundation.' There is a claiming here, and a reckoning--a celebration of endurance in an intimate, open-eyed remembering."