Siste Viator

Reviews

Clearer and grimmer than her debut, Manguso’s enticing sophomore effort has both the gravity of epitaphs and enough oddity to halt readers in their tracks.Publishers Weekly

Did you read any poetry in 2006? There’s still time. Go get Sarah Manguso’s smart, witty, and wonderfully strange collection Siste Viator.Time Out New York

Grim, desperate, and funny, Manguso returns to death as terror and comfort. Crisp and lively, her poetry captures the extremes of this “sweet hard life.”Rachel Aviv, The Village Voice

This is a terrific, fearless, and deeply moving book, one that tackles an ambitious subject with humor and startling intelligence.Kevin Prufer, Colorado Review

Manguso is more punk than prog, a rogue agent. Siste Viator is an intimately personal work of immensely mythic proportions.Dobby Gibson, Rain Taxi

These are confessional poems in which the poet tries to out-talk received language, to hear the murmur of the self underneath.Craig Morgan Teicher, Boston Review

The poems in Sarah Manguso’s second collection crackle with wicked fire. There is mortal gravity here but also a kind of cheeky weirdness.Paul Guest, Diagram

Manguso is “together” with someone, but not herself, as though she were cheating on herself with herself, which is a bizarre but exquisitely clean identity crisis.Ryo Yamaguchi, Dislocate

There is urgency without hastiness. There is graveness without melodrama. And there is desperation but not without humor. Starkness takes over.Jason Labbe, Meridian

These poems will not tip in the direction they are pushed—they will fall in the direction that Manguso has set for them. These poems are permanent. There is only confidence.John Findura, Valparaiso Poetry Review

Both funny and affecting—a rare combination in contemporary poetry. Manguso’s is a poetry that reaches past the seen and known.Nancy Kuhl, The Laurel Review

White space allows readers to make connections themselves. This is achieved remarkably well in poems such as “Address from One Place to Another.”Kristin Abraham, Review Revue

One of our most exciting young poets. Her associative leaps are ferocious but never far-fetched.Anis Shivani, New South

Young people turn to her writing the way people went to stand in front of Nico at the time of her Marble Index. She will long be imitated, but the weary animation of her best work will never be equalled.Kevin Killian, Amazon.com