Eloquent, wistful, and inventive, Jenny Sadre-Orafai's first book proves “everywhere is an atlas.” She enlarges moments of wonderment and sadness into poems that map radiant intimacies and flickering bonds. Her vivid and exact phrasing streamlines lines, amplifies sonic pleasures. Syllables tick forward beautifully: “Gutting this love, I listen for the grind/ still.” Paper, Cotton, Leather is an exhilarating and moving debut.
Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning
Haunting as a fever dream, this debut collection from Jenny Sadre-Orafai is at once tender and bold, vulnerable and unflinching. Paper, Cotton, Leather, an intimate look at a relationship unraveled, marries immaculate craftsmanship and tensile language to create poems that vibrate with their urgency. The brevity of Sadre-Orafai's poems belies an elegant narrative arc that is compelling in its universality and heartbreaking in its honesty.
Kelly Davio, author of Burn This House
The specter of divorce haunts Sadre-Orafai’s debut, although Paper, Cotton, Leather is much more than a lyrical response to loss. Paper, Cotton, Leather is an instruction manual for the amateur anthropologist, the domestic ghost-hunter, and the doomsday prepper. In “Retract or Recant,” Sadre-Orafai writes: "I was taught curve into the slide/when spinning on frozen road.” This is exactly what Paper, Cotton, Leather can teach us: how to navigate the heart’s switchbacks, how to survive a spin-out on its loneliest back roads.
Shelley Puhak, author of Guinevere in Baltimore
“Paper, Cotton, Leather is an exhilarating and moving debut.”
Additional Praise
Sadre-Orafai refuses a masculine mode. She hovers between the horror of the home and the horror of opening the home to our eyes; she keeps her power by choosing neither.
Bookslut
In Paper, Cotton, Leather, many unimportant things—unimportant only in a past where they were uninteresting—suddenly become like small leitmotifs for trouble and loss.
PANK
In those crisp, taut poems, Sadre-Orafai turns the familiar thematic of love and loss into an effervescent meditation on how each individual mind apprehends the world, on how each heart learns of its own intimate path to whatever it is that compels it to go on, and on.
Heavy Feather Review
It is apparent that Sadre-Orafai has strived to write the hard poems with this collection, the ones that claw and moan and demand themselves to be told, and has done so with a wonderful show of craft. And yet, Sadre-Orafai has clearly polished these poems to a point where if you’re not careful, you might forget just how emotionally heavy they really are.
Arcadia
We are left only with what the poet chooses to reveal. With what poetry is perhaps best at conveying. A selection of life’s moments as if through lens and shutter.
As It Ought to Be
