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Houston, Texas – June 30, 2024 – Press Release:

Saint Julian Press is proud to announce Sarah Carey’s new book of poetry, The Grief Committee Minutes, to be published on September 14, 2024. This debut poetry collection navigates the landscapes of loss and memory, weaving nature, family, and time into a haunting meditation on grief and hope.
How the past haunts us, even as life goes on. And how the birds—ah, the birds—match us, tapping and feeding and squabbling and, once in a while, showing us how to fly. Sarah Carey flies in this book—her dead mother on her back, the past in all its complications, yes, but fly she does. The poetry, “the wing //my life careens on to its close.” A good read.
—Alice Friman
On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems
This remarkable debut resides in a liminal space, striding between natural and spiritual realms. Sarah Carey doesn't miss anything, not the blur of a peregrine wing nor the secrets of an ailing father. In some ways, The Grief Committee Minutes is a book-length elegy, mourning the poet's lost family but also the fleetingness of life in general. We don't get to stay in this beautiful, difficult space for long. Instead, "we learn to live, as Atlas did, with the heavens / holding each other, the world." This book teems with life even as it looks death in the eye, never flinching. A wild, wonderful collection of poems
—Erica Wright
All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned
On the timelessness of grief, Carey’s moving debut deftly captures the “end to means to end” by which “we let each other go.” With startling clarity, these poems detail multiple articulations of self and home that carry across generations, in which loss is both finite and infinite. Parental loss, the pandemic losses, and aging (loss of self) are imbricated in these poems, asking the reader to consider what is knowable and unknowable about a life and those who are closest to us. In lyrics that are spare and cutting, rangy and lush, this thanatological collection thrills with beauty and its passing, with the ways the past is embedded in the present, and with the lives one attempts to rescue through memory. Its buoyant music dazzles and haunts.
—Chelsea Dingman
I, Divided
Sarah Carey’s luminous new poems reckon with our beautiful and broken world with the intimacy and precision of a writer at her peak. Daughter of a dying mother and a threatened Earth, she grafts truths that root her and her readers in shared history, place—and the strength to rise like the pines and swallow-tails on these pages. “Why rebuild?” Carey asks in an electrifying hurricane poem. This collection holds the answers, and all that is dear. 
—-Cynthia Barnett
Rain and The Sound of the Sea
In her stunning debut, The Grief Committee Minutes, Sarah Carey offers a yearning litany of familial love, spirituality, and the inevitable loss and grief that defines the human condition. In each poem, no matter the topic—from horseback riding lessons and hurricanes to dementia and war—the reader can distinguish the angst, the bargaining, and the reckoning with which the poet wrestles. “Like any good flame / I tapered, acquiescing / to my extinction,” she writes in “What We Read About Ukraine Makes Us Dream of Burning.” But taken as a whole, these accessible, recognizable poems with their soaring imagery, most often viewed through the lens of the natural, northern Florida world, are also about the persistence of faith and the steadfastness of true companions, human and otherwise. Carey’s tone is often curious, gentle, and accepting. “No one knows the ways / we let each other go,” she writes in “The Beach House Offers an Elegy.” But her phrasing is also incisive, perceptive, and quick-witted. In the end, her tight command of language convinces readers that perhaps it is she who controls the world around her rather than the other way around.
—Jen Karetnick
Inheritance with a High Error Rate
Winner of the 2022 Cider Press Book Award
Sarah Carey is a North Carolina native who grew up in Florida and has spent most of her life there. She attended Duke University and Florida State University, where she received a master’s degree in English with a creative writing concentration.  Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Gulf Coast, Five Points, Rattle, Florida Review, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. Sarah is the author of two poetry chapbooks, including Accommodations, winner of the 2018 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award, (Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, 2019) and The Heart Contracts, (Finishing Line Press, 2016.)  She has worked in journalism and public relations for her entire professional career, including over 30 years as director of communications for the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, and has amassed numerous honors and awards for her writing. She lives in Gainesville with her husband and a big black Lab.
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​Visit her Amazon author page to learn more about Sarah and order her books.
 
https://amazon.com/author/sarahcarey
 
Her website is: https://sarahkcarey.com/. 
 
You can also find her on Facebook @SarahKCarey, on Twitter/X @SayCarey1 and on Instagram @skcarey1.
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Paperback:  $18.00
Publisher: ‎ Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Language: ‎ English
Paperback ISBN-13:  978-1-955194-37-2
E-Book ISBN:  978-1-955194-38-9
Library of Congress Control Number:  2024940118
Paperback:  114 pages
 
For a PDF Advance Copy, contact Ron Starbuck or Sarah Carey
The Grief Committee Minutes – Press Release PDF for Download
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sjp_press_release_grief_committee_minutes_v2.pdf
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Fine Book Distributors & Retailers

 Saint Julian Press, Inc. * Houston, TX 77008  *  Ron Starbuck ~ Publisher-CEO
 Email: ronstarbuck@saintjulianpress.com * Web: www.saintjulianpress.com