Bend celebrates the pleasures of language with wit and great humanity.

Bend is a literary tour-de-force exploring themes of transformation.

Bend is fun to read; it offers its substance with a smile.

Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-03-3

Natasha Sajé’s first book of poems, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and her second collection, Bend (Tupelo, 2004), was given the Utah Book Award in Poetry. Her book of essays Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory will be published by the University of Michigan Press in 2014. She teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.

“Natasha Sajé’s new book Bend divulges the spirit of a sensualist and the habits of a contemplative; sometimes vice versa. Colors are separated with the veracity of paint. Shifts in temperature are registered and background noises distinguished, not only for texture’s sake but for their essential contribution to the poems’ substance. Fine foods are sung and individual words lit. For company Sajé summons a curious assortment of lettered forbears including Cotton Mather, Henry Vaughan, Nietzsche, Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Mary Shelley. A virtuous and subtly depraved book is Bend”—C.D. Wright

“The language of Sajé’s poems dares the world to be delightful and I’m delighted to see it rise to the challenge. Guillevic once hoped that poetry would “do to things what light does to them,” and Sajé’s poems do just that, waking up the plants, pleating the landscape like an accordion, giving fruits their Zurbaran-like precision in bowls of perfect sunlight. There is also the sure-footed gliding into the absence of light for an occasional raid of revenge into the past. Sajé’s light-language reflects and shocks the objects it considers before they know what touched them. A second reading is inevitable”—Andrei Codrescu

A Minor Riot at the Mint

Custome is the most certain Mistresse of language, as the publicke stampe makes current money. But we must not be too frequent with the mint, every day coyning. —Ben Jonson

Into my pocket slips a folded note, creased like labia, cached with private promise. Pea blossoms in broth. And my in petto pleasure in thinking the missive for me, the edges keen against my thumb, my plotting to be alone and open it. Is it tame as a Hepplewhite chair or nubile as a pitchfork?

The ship rolls through open water, dirty in the bay around Rio. I’m a crazy sailor on the gravy boat, a woman of means. This letter’s mine only till St. Geoffrey’s Day, and if the paper degrades, that’s how it goes with money. I’ll wave the wealth where any frigate bird can snatch it.

O my mackintosh, my bilbo, my cistern, my confiture,

I love you so much you breathe me away.

We Saw No Caribou

except on metal signs, the cartooned antlers ungainly, black against yellow.

Were we not still enough when the heat of day had dissolved and the animals coolly

made their way into the blue dusk? We drank their water, ruddled from the rocks,

and shared their air, as clean as absence. We would have photographed them, of course,

along with the Montmorency Falls, the Île d’Orleans, notched on memory’s belt, accreted.

And if we had beheld caribou, moose—or cougar!— would the sight have blessed us

like the Shroud of Turin or simply been allied with one moment,

contained in time by the word vacation? In a Bierstadt painting, they’d be larger

than the Indians, smaller than the sky, part of the grandeur. Disney would make them

friendly, laughable and safe. In a zoo we’d call them forlorn, circumscribed by fake

rocks and pools. In our photographs a sheared fur of trees wraps the hills.

Below us the lakes stretch and curl. Around our bodies an altitude, around

our heads a nimbus. And in the center, freed of their anchor in God, our eyes

look back at our immanent selves.

The Philosopher’s Name Was Misspelled Everywhere

Man is the cruelest animal. She wanted to sleep with the philosopher, she wanted to feel the warmth of his back against her chest. Some people had trouble with the consonants, others reversed the vowels. He made her think—that was his gift. She wanted to name a restaurant after him, the offerings cued to his epigrams: Bellwether Pie, Christian Vice Pudding. The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god, he had said. She was always hungry but she knew words wouldn’t feed her or save the Tutsis in Rwanda. When she thought of genocide, she wished she could lose her appetite. Of course he’d been dead longer than the million Tutsis who had been macheted into pieces. A low-tech war. Unimaginable, she would have said, a hundred years after the philosopher’s wisdom: the savage appetites of ordinary people turned to killers turned back to ordinary people.

Marcel at the Station House

If you find yourself being questioned about a crime you did not commit, resist at all costs the impulse to be helpful. —Social psychologist Richard Ofshe

Where were you the night of July 10?

I am unable to say from what place, from which dream, anything comes.

If you were to commit a crime…

I would prepare the hundred masks that must fit a single face.

You would plan it?

How many persons, cities, or roads does jealousy make us eager to know? I’d think about details.

Like hair and fibers?

Like boeuf a la mode, like water lilies, like Vermeer’s View of Delft.

You went out to dinner that night?

I observe, I speak with servants, I remember.

But sometimes you do the things you think about?

Nothing is as satisfying as the imagination’s rendering of it.

Because you have a bad memory?

Hours go by and I remember the tremors in my thighs.

So how do you…

I like to watch famished rats clawing and biting each other.

Are you kidding?

The day my mother died she took her little Marcel with her.

And how did it feel when you first put your hands around her neck?

A slight ripple, like sipping linden tea or feeling a fingernail trail against a taut stomach.

What was she wearing?

A Fortuny gown, pleated red silk, and diamonds. Red shoes, of course. Everything of those days has perished, but everything was born again.

Did you love her?

I prefer to remain closeted with the little person inside me, hymning the rising sun. He would make me happier than she.

There’s a lot of evidence. We have a lot of evidence. We have your hair.

I’d curl it to face the photographer. I’d wear my velvet jacket, and the apple trees would expose their broad petals of white.

You were nervous? You pitched the body in the trunk?

No, I would have laid it on an old satin coverlet, after which I would have consoled myself if I felt well enough, by walking along the avenues. I would have taken my walking stick, I would have sung at the top of my voice. I would have taken a few grams of Veronal.

Are you sorry?

Ars longa, vita brevis.

Which means?

I am acquainted with sin, in one form or another. Dostoevsky writes about murder, but did he commit it? Laclos was the best of husbands.

But you?

I don’t invent things. I’ve become braver, thinking of my journey into the self like rappelling down a well without a rope.

You used a rope?

Oh! The trinity of braided strands, the coarse erotic fibers.

I’d like to try a polygraph, if that’s all right with you.

.4 lbs

6 × .5 × 9 in

2014 Mark Fischer Poetry Award, Telluride Arts Festival 2008 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America 2004 Utah Poetry Book of the Year, Bend Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Red Under the Skin, her first book of poems. Towson State Prize in Literature for Red Under the Skin. Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. 2002 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize.