THE NERVE EPISTLE
by Sarah Riggs
In Sarah Riggs’ The Nerve Epistle friendship and family travel through a void of separation with a wake of streaking light. Her poems, each written to a friend or loved one, invoke the connection between two people who stand facing some of life’s most trying moments, finding solace in their shared words. The natural world serves as a muse and an emotional backdrop. Each epistle works in tandem with an immersive picture of poetic relationships built on love, time, understanding, and mutual concern. “The end of life: what is it / The light diagonal, the tops of trees / Turning in a forest, these words / Holding us together, not to feel alone”
Riggs expands our understanding of epistolary conversation by using multiple referents to weave a fabric of simultaneous sequences. New associations are formed between words as Riggs pushes readers past the literal and further into their own imagination. Nouns become emotions, and her verses make illustrations out of thought. “The change into birds and a draft in the atmosphere / The lanes dividing and deteriorating / off at an angle / Wished for the privacy of a hollow / departure /And then returning into mellow / mere thought.”
The Nerve Epistle only gives vague premonitions of the friends Riggs writes to. These elusive outlines of the recipients grant readers the freedom to create interpersonal bonds beyond what's written on the page, making Riggs' work one of passion and perspective, rather than calculated definition. “Dear Rosmarie, / The time falls through the hours / and I am in love again, a porthole / in a very thick wall through which / wind is whistling. I could reach / your hand even your wrist and we / were whispering through our fingers / places we had heard in slips of / seconds.”
People are saying:
“As nerves animate the territory within and between bodies, a shuttle is thrown from one hand to another. These messages are near and real, firing across spaces felt as geographical distance and visionary kinship. Sarah Riggs’ epistles catch the slant of this instant we pass through, of friendship and readership, transhistorical and oceanic, at once found and ever more luminously at sea.”
– Elizabeth Willis
“Amidst a culture in which ‘The frame of work is more. / The fringe of the hour is shaved,’ The Nerve Epistle models Time, loosed by the poet’s imagination, accumulating in the density of foliage, through textures of regret, in the stuttering of syllables.
“Time, embodied, becomes our power. Like a nerve, ‘it is power also into the fingers, the brains,’ it is filling our lungs toward a future. Riggs’ lines move to and from the United States, France, Haiti, Egypt, Morocco; to beloveds and intimacies of various scales; to the necessary impossibility of unfolding understandings of race in the United States to a child whose body straddles this question; to the devastated earth, to whom we are each promised to return.
“With tenderness and curiosity Riggs fingers the lines of thought and experience that draw us to and from one another in times of crisis. ‘For there / are bodies in the words, massacres in / them, massacres in the documents / the treaties, the owning, the ownership / the books.’ Against the violences that arise through regulatory texts and State directives, delight emerges in spaces of shared language. And in the vulnerability of what is offered—even when we know so little, our corporeality is deep in ‘a sense of not / being ready, being made beautiful.’”
– Saretta Morgan