Linda Annas Ferguson knows—to borrow Wallace Stevens’ formulation—that “Death is the mother of beauty.” She proclaims in one of her poems, “Everything / is drenched with endings, alive with dying.” Her work exists at the shimmering mid-point between an urge to celebrate the world’s beauty and a pained recognition that this beauty is mutable. She recognizes that our being only temporary inhabitants of this life is not a problem to solve but a mystery to feel—and a mystery that compels us to make poems. As she wryly puts it, she is “dying to write / a decent poem.” Linda Annas Ferguson has done more than that. She has given us a book of tender, clear-eyed, complex meditations, a lovely book by a poet whose vision we can trust.
— Chris Forhan, author of Black Leapt In
Dirt Sandwich is about love, loss, and, above all, vanishment—“an oyster, still silky and iridescent,” “the ocean, never deep enough.” For me, the book has three touchstones—the title poem, in which a woman whose husband is dying takes the earth he will become into her own body, “Midsummer’s Eve” in which we see friends between two worlds galloping through the dark woods outside a bonfire’s circle, and the last poem in the book that ends “You whisper/‘stay,’ to the small of my palm, my cheek/to all I thought was without need.” Three touchstones are more than the law allows, but Linda Annas Ferguson has achieved them and with her permission I’ll be carrying them, warm in my pocket, on my own journey.
— Lola Haskins, author of Solutions Beginning with A
