Books
Winner of the 2020 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry, my newest book, This Bright Darkness, is published by Black Lawrence Press.
““Cradling Monsoons” is a brave, challenging and sometimes startling collection, but always brilliant. McKinstry-Brown is in top form. Every syllable shines with a fine polish. When I reached the end, I gave myself a few seconds for a happy sigh, then went right back to the beginning and started over. Her poem “Farmer’s Heaven” is deeply moving, and it cradles my heart every time I return to it. If you’ve forgotten (or never experienced) how thrilling good poetry can be, get this book.”
Anthologies
“[Sarah writes] poems that bless her mother’s laundry, honor the gritty details of life, reveal the mystery of birth—language that is full of life, poems that stay with you.”
Journals
Consider subscribing to these fantastic literary journals who've supported me as an artist by publishing my work.
“Before this daughter,
what did we clasp our hands
and ask for, what brought us to our knees? Love
struck a match, and she appeared, little flame
whose first cry lit up every corner of this city,
before burning it
to the ground. It’s raining ash, and our wishes
are so small now
we could fit them on a single candle,
hold them in the palm of our hands.
”
“Exquisite craft and strikingly tender aesthetics merge brilliantly with the urgency of complex gender politics in Sarah McKinstry-Brown’s This Bright Darkness. While many of the poems in the collection reach back in time and mythology, the book could not be more essential and more poignant than it is right at this moment.McKinstry-Brown writes of a time “when a mother is told over and over/ that her daughter is just another/ siren, warning, a story to be taught.” And isn’t this time now? And how desperately we need these poems to teach us to know what is at stake.
”