Sarah J. Sloat, "Hotel Almighty" (Sarabande, 2020)

New Books in Literature

Visually arresting and utterly one-of-a-kind, Sarah J. Sloat's Hotel Almighty (Sarabande Books) is a book-length erasure of Misery by Stephen King, a reimagining of the novel's themes of constraint and possibility in elliptical, enigmatic poems. Here, "joy would crawl over broken glass, if that was the way." Here, sleep is “a circle whose diameter might be small," a circle "pitifully small," a "wrecked and empty hypothetical circle." Paired with Sloat's stunning mixed-media collage, each poem is a miniature canvas, a brief associative profile of the psyche―its foibles, obsessions, and delights. (Description by the publisher.)

“When I was doing [Hotel Almighty] and even now when I work on projects, a lot of what I find I’m doing is just expressing a love of reading and of books themselves,” says Sloat in discussing her new book. “I mean, I just love paper. To take a book and be able to make it into something — that was really fun and exciting for me."

Sarah J. Sloat is the author of Hotel Almighty, a collection of visual poetry published in September by Sarabande Books. Born in New Jersey, Sarah has lived in Kansas, China, and Italy, and now splits her time between Frankfurt and Barcelona, where she works as a news editor. She has spent most of the pandemic in Germany with her husband and son, eating take-out schnitzel and working in her pyjamas. Her favorite poets include Federico Garcia Lorca, Vasko Popa, Natasha Trethewey and Charles Wright.

Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction.

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