In the Nocturnal Animal House

Sarah Cotterill is a native of a rural upstate New York. She received a B. A. from Swarthmore College and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow. She has been a Yaddo Fellow and has received grants from the Maryland Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared previously in journals and in The Hive Burning, a chapbook. She currently lives in Maryland and teaches at the Writers' Center in Bethesda.

"Cotterill's lyrics inscribe a sensitivity so finely tuned and so radically receptive that it must be strung together with the utmost rigor. The resulting poems comprise some of the most painfully exquisite music that I know of." --Jonathan Holden "In this density of words there coexists that lightness of musical phrasing that carries the reader along through the connections of images, sounds, words." West Branch "Sarah Cotterill's first book reveals a ripened gift, powerful and thrilling. Her overall tone has a quality of sobriety and melancholy out of which she attains moments of earned ecstasy. Sentimentality is entirely absent. Her themes are personal in the best, most felt-through way, and are at the same time infused with a sense of the larger world - of history and pre-history, and of our own time of 'ambition, adversaries, and presidents.' The way craft and vision act in complete and necessary harmony in these poems brilliantly (and profoundly) illustrates the meaning of Pound's 'Dichten=Condensare' as I understand it." --Denise Levertov "Sensual, intelligent, and possessed of a quiet Puritan genius, these poems are a mysterious celebration of a characteristic life." --Jean Valentine "With a clear eye and a music both tough and delicate, Sarah Cotterill's poems braid together the astonishing dramas of ordinary human life and a complex, precise understanding of the natural world. This welcome book will give pleasure, re-reading after re-reading." --William Matthews