The Art of Love: New and Selected Poems
La Alameda Press, 1994
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Known for her poetics of linked happenstance, leaping detail and Buddhist practice, Miriam Sagan pulls the Vast Life into an intensely personal cohesion. Tough and compassionate, her poems reach deep into the mythos and heartlines of marriage, motherhood, Jewish heritage, city, mountain, female desire and the beauty inhabited by Matisse, García Lorca, Issan Dorsey and Pocahontas. Within this selection are eight poems of the Margaret Sanger cycle, written with a grant from the Barbara Deming Foundation.

“Sagan writes with grace and verve…what is most remarkable is her ability to move among religious traditions, to convince us that at least within the borders of her poems many traditions can coexist peacefully… Brisk, vivid, clean, evocative and provocative, (her) poems are gentle and fierce investigations of late century life.”
—Jeff Gundy, Mid-American Review