Alice Ages and Ages by Sarah White

Never in American letters, before Alice Ages and Ages, have we seen a thigh at once so elegant and portentous. Upon its surface a filigree of web-like veins—empurpled, cerulean, blood-red, according to certain gradations of self-regard and fear. Where will we find its meaning? Deep-rooted in Alice’s flesh? In its mirror image? Behind the looking glass in the specular world? If anyone knows, Sarah White does. Follow her words toward the heart of this spidery labyrinth. Stay always alert.

—Eugene Garber, author of O Amazonas Escuro

Alice deconstructed, Alice revised, in Alice Ages and Ages, Sarah White  puts the lookingglass through Alice and makes me feel as though Alice were everywhere, as though the first principle of Alice were: the fantastic voyage of the body requires us to perform necessary inversions.  Alice the tattooed girl, the intravenous destination, is torn between looking forward, looking back, and looking down at the sharp. spidery splinters that beleaguer her.  With wit, tart asides, mournful logic, and the shivery creation of a new literary world, Sarah White draws us inevitably to her poems and prose poems, as we “flow to Alice City”…

—David Lazar, author of Powder Town, editor of Hotel Amerika

In 1947, Raymond Queneau, inspired by Bach’s Art of the Fugue, wrote Exercices de Style, in which one small scenario is retold  99 different ways. In Alice Ages and Ages,  Sarah White refracts Queneau’s variations in her own rich poetic kaleidosope. This is a slice of life, as if watching Mrs. Dalloway for an hour in her home and then watching her with 3D glasses, vaulting her into parallel universes, from nursery to Kafkaesque office block. White’s imagination, skill, and wit meet the demands of variation. A small moment expands into the myriad consolations of a creative life. She borrows voices and uses forms of verse, letters, quizzes, and alternate points of view. Word play, sound, and sheer intelligent joy runs through it.

—Claudia Carlson, author of The Elephant House

Sarah White’s variations inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass manage to be at once serio-comic meditations on vanity and aging and joyful celebrations of language and the human imagination.

—Stephen O’Connor, author of Here Comes Another Lesson

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Before moving to Manhattan, Sarah White taught French language and literature at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA.  She is author of a poetry collection, Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson (Spuyten Duyvil, 2007), a poetry chapbook, Mrs. Bliss and the Paper Spouses (Pudding House, 2007), and a book-length lyric essay, The Poem Has Reasons: a Story of Far Love (www. proempress.com, 2008).  She is also co-translator (with Matilda Bruckner and Laurie Shepard) of Songs of the Women Troubadours (Garland, 2000).

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