Siste Viator
by Sarah Manguso
Four Way Books, 2006
Buy from amazon.com
Buy from fourwaybooks.com
My twenties were plagued by poor health,
and I expected to die by the end of them. To my horror I lived to be thirty. I started this book as an exercise
in being dead. On some level I must have thought, "OK, I'm going to have to be dead to escape this. So I'm dead.
Now what do I say?"
Sarah Manguso
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
Gorgeous and
cerebral.... Poetry-fearers, don't back away from this beautiful book; these
might be the pages that bring you back into the form.
Dave Eggers
