"In To Eve, Sarah Dickenson Snyder dismantles the mythology of blame and rewrites the story of the first woman as one of agency, hunger, and sacred curiosity. This book-length poem moves from Eden to our modern-day life of parking garages, newborn clothing, placing the phone after a father's diagnosis, and always in Snyder's engaging voice: I don't understand Reiki. Why not touch? / And yet I do believe in the energy / of between - look how magnets pull. In these times, we need these retellings, this reframing and reclaiming of maternal power, female desire, and strength. Let's just love everyone, imagine / each is a god - this gorgeous book reminds us of our humanness and what it's like to care and caretake, to live the larger life despite that no one I know has returned / from death to say, "You'll be fine." Both intimate and expansive, To Eve insists that knowledge is not a fall, but a beginning." --Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Accidental Devotions
Read an Excerpt:
There was a story
in rib, snake, & apple,
but sometimes you need to
say frost to statue the world
so you can find what is lost.
Or even sand to feel your feet
sink, enter what is below.
Don’t be afraid of darkness.
It is there that we are solved,
our hinge to gods. Everywhere
we can’t see, there.
The way pollen enters
even closed windows,
the way fingertips
sweep skin and find
the dust of all
the other worlds.
