Week/End

Week/End is a portrait of a break-up. With any break-up, with any loss, we're left to tend to a dissolved intimacy, the empty space where closeness was. With equal candor & imagination, Duncan reshapes intimacy into a verb. Ebb. Flow. Break. Turn. Let. Go. She immerses us in closure's mud & fog, in closure's very open-ended-ness. Duncan writes with great attention to paradox, tenderness & transparency. In Duncan's tender grasp, the clouds become an elegy, sorry, a masterpiece. She grapples with the lost beloved, "How do you want me to tell it?" I'm grateful she told it as boldly, nuanced, & carefully as this.

--Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium and Be/Hold Week/End is a beautiful chapbook full of longing & surrender, desire & departure. The poems make loud all the silences that fall, sometimes, between us and the ones we love. These sweet little violences we make of ourselves and each other are captured starkly here with honesty & candor. I admire this courageous writing and I am thankful that it exists.

-Lauren Whitehead, Writer, Performer, Dramaturg Language is Sarah Duncan's playground where she doesn't follow the rules of the turf -- she snowboards down the slides, flips the swings upside down to wear them as hats. Duncan does not just play with language. She invents it. This chapbook reads like a relationship on a dissection table -- it picks at tiny bones. It magnifies the little, unlivable moments that haunt us with their humiliation after. The parts of love that are too desolate, too awkward, the parts of the story you leave out in your retelling to friends. The parts that most poems forget or conceal. And here, gorgeously, Sarah Duncan shows us the quiet elements of trauma, mental illness, and heartache and doesn't let them go unsung. This book made me feel less alone.

- Megan Falley, author of Drive Here and Devastate Me The inscription reads "this book is 4 lonely queers everywhere" and it is apt. For any of us who have struggled with the incapacitating loneliness that comes from isolation, this chapbook encapsulates that sentiment over the course of a difficult week in Sarah Duncan's life. Duncan writes viscerally and poignantly about shame, solitude, desire, ending, inadequacy, distance, wellness, need, finality, vulnerability and gutteral yearning.

-Mal Blum (writer/musician/fan of nothing)