I’m too harried with work to write a thorough review of Sara Veglahn’s extraordinary chapbook Closed Histories, but I want to take a moment to recommend it. To the extent that comparisons are useful in describing a distinctive new voice, I would say that her work has similarities to writers as diverse as Karen Volkman, Yves Bonnefoy, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux, and the Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons. Needless to say, I hope, these associations are subjective, and Ms. Veglahn herself might disavow them all! So I should let her speak for herself, if briefly:
From the window, light. From the light a pattern. From patterns, the shape of the world. A thought in a shape. A different kind of world. As if in a mirror, the way that you are not yourself in your reflection.
Each of Veglahn’s prose poems occur in this voice, but each unfolds in its own way.