Sara Nicholson

Poet Sara Nicholson is the author of the poetry collections What the Lyric Is (2016) and The Living Method (2014). 

Nicholson’s allusive poetry of inquiry is composed with close attention to syllable and syntax. In a 2015 review of The Living Method for A Perimeter, Hajara Quinn observes that “Nicholson establishes a metaphysical attraction to a multi-disciplinary poetics,” while on the Public Books blog list of the best poetry books of 2013-2014, poet Geoffrey G. O’Brien chose The Living Method, stating, “the method is more than meter, it’s meter’s living purpose: Nicholson wields the authority of archival rhythms and the forceful syntax of a logician, but she constantly attaches these certainties to a wildness of premise and a brevity of figure: instead of self, ruled utterance; instead of help, poetry.”

On selecting Nicholson’s The Living Method for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets prize, Joshua Edwards noted, “The poems in Nicholson's collection, diverse as they are, are all intensely bold. Sure, they are often aphoristic and declamatory, but this is not the sort of boldness that I mean. I mean a boldness akin to that of Catullus and Dickinson. Like them, Nicholson makes the page into an eye that stares directly.” In an author’s note for her poem “The Burden,” Nicholson states, “A creative writing teacher once told me that I didn't know how to use prepositions. I'm still not sure I've mastered them. Not knowing's not exactly a burden I carry along with or inside or behind me. Instead, I think of it as my refrain.”