Lynne Sachs

64 pages, paperback, 2019, $15.00

Tender Buttons Press

When filmmaker Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs' life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, YEAR BY YEAR POEMS juxtaposes Sachs' finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts. In this way, she reveals her process of navigating within and alongside historical events such as the Moon Landing, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., streaking, the Anita Hill hearings, the Columbine shootings, and controversies around universal health care. In YEAR BY YEAR POEMS, Lynne Sachs realizes the long anticipated leap from her extraordinary career in filmmaking to this, her first book of poems. With an introduction by Paolo Javier, former Queens poet laureate and author of the book Court of the Dragon.

"The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne Sachs shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all."—Phillip Lopate

#12 on Small Press Distribution's October 2019 Best Seller List!

Favorite Poetry in 2019 -- Dennis Cooper Year End List