Check is a book of contemporary poetic satire about the groups that we inevitably form and their consequences: in-groups and out-groups and mutual suspicion. Sarah Tolmie writes about parents and teenagers, social media users, different kinds of writers, university professors, feminists, celebrities, pundits—each one in possession of a different truth and determined to defend it. Hatred and intolerance are always the province of other people, never ourselves. Check begins and ends with the premise that toleration is exceedingly difficult and exasperating; it should not be casually assumed, and failures in it are universal.
The Art of Dying is a contemporary ars moriendi, a learn-to-die manual. It takes the form seriously but is also a satire of today’s euphemistic treatment of death, as well as the follies of social media and so-called posthumanism.
Sarah’s elegy “Ursula Le Guin in the Underworld” was published in On Spec 107 in April 2018, where she was also interviewed by Colleen Anderson. It won the Rhysling Award for SFF Poetry, 2019, and the Aurora Award for Best Poem or Song, 2019.
Trio
Trio is collection of 120 sonnets in eight parts, revealing, frame by frame, a married female narrator in love with two younger men—an intellectual and a dancer—and torn between the claims of body and mind.
Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems is a limited edition, hand-sewn chapbook published by Baseline Press in November 2014. It is a collection of 23 wistful love sonnets edited by Karen Schindler, and with cover art by Dominic Snyder. The image is used by permission.
