Devil’s Lake. Poetry by Sarah M. Sala. Paperback. 88 pages. August 11th, 2020. ISBN 9781948800372.

What does it mean to claim your space in a world that’s ending? Sarah Sala’s Devil’s Lake breaks open the American moment of unchecked gun violence, climate changes, and the growing rift between "us" and "them" with formal daring in the lineage of Anne Carson and CAConrad. Within the rich, emotional cartography of these poems, we witness an anxious teacher fixated on the possibility of school shooting, erasures of a homophobic letter, an account of the 1988 murder of Rebecca Wight along the Appalachian Trail, and myriad other moments both personal and political, elemental and ephemeral. Like a prism, this startling debut fractures into shades of possibility and memory, queering science, nature, and form to lay bare the colors of joy despite a world that seems intent on its destruction.