Say Sand

Whether considering a bus decorated by the grandmothers of former lovers, a child's view of a disembodied beard wandering hallways, or a dinner party given by a scampering herd of mice, the poems in Say Sand, Daniel Coudriet's first collection, complicate and reconfigure our emotional connections to one another by permeating them with urgent senses of mystery and authority. With sometimes humorous and often unsettling pulses of imagery, Coudriet builds a world with these poems that is both like our own and unlike anything we can imagine.

Daniel Coudriet

Daniel Coudriet lives with his wife and son, and the family divides time between Argentina and the United States. He was educated at University of Virginia, Hollins University, and University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he earned an MFA. He has also published translations of Argentinean poetry in many journals. Say Sand is his first book.

Reviews

The mouth is the primal mind, and it speaks everywhere in this riveting, experimental debut collection. The synaesthetic economies of translation and exile, and of transport between the realm of childhood and adulthood, are perpetually negotiated—"we say sand to mean buried," Coudriet writes in "Merienda"—in poems that are part animal fable, part god (less) myth, part human story. We can be grateful for this hunger and daring, as Dickinson would admonish, to "Split the Lark, [to find] find the Music." Coudriet's is a dismembered and disremembering vision offering evidence of the lost heart's belonging to this world through the imperatives of its speech.

—Lisa Russ Spaar

Everyday life is full of magic. Why? We don't know. How? We also don't know. Daniel Coudriet's poems trace these great truths through all their maddening diversions. They are beautiful & sad & full of mind-bending blossomings. This is a book to remember.

—James Tate

Language spills everywhere in Say Sand, it says so in the book. Passion, joy, sorrow, regret, pity, anguish, languishing loafing, brash saying, careful observation, real observation by means of language's poetic magnifications. The book also says, "No language is small enough to name . . . to keep the poem from emptying itself everywhere." A bold, beautiful foray.

—Dara Wier

Ordering Information

To purchase Say Sand by Daniel Coudriet, please contact our distributor, University Press of New England toll free at 1-800-421-1561 or by fax at 1-603-448-9729. The book is also available online at UPNE, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine retailers.

To request a copy for review, please contact the Carnegie Mellon University Press Editorial Offices at (412) 268-2861 or by email at CarnegieMellonUniversityPress@gmail.com.