Vivarium

A vivarium is an enclosure for living things — plants or animals — which might likewise be said of a poem. With a vivacious sensibility and unruly leaps from elegiac to ironic, Sajé’s new book is an abecedarium, fully using the page, and challenging all manner of received wisdom. Employing lyrics, lists, arguments, narratives, and meditations, and including prose poems devoted to particular letters as well as invented visual or conceptual pieces, in Vivarium the alphabet is endowed with power far beyond usefulness. Form breathes life in this book, and the lived emotion of these poems defies death. “In Vivarium, Natasha Sajé, one of poetry’s most ludic and encyclopedic essayists, explores language — and the alphabet — in terms both acerbic and lush, exposing the roots of the world’s ills, and its many rooted pleasures. In a word, zowie!” — Mary Ruefle “Resourceful, restless, witty and substantially intelligent — what a rare combination of erudition and nimbleness this group of poems exhibits. Their range is marvelously wide in both form and tone… Each poem surprised me, taught me something, delighted and illuminated and stretched.” —Dean Young, in a citation for the Academy of American Poets’ 2008 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award