Praise for Paper, Cotton, Leather

Eloquent, wistful, and inventive, Jenny Sadre-Orafai's first book proves “everywhere is an atlas.” She enlarges moments of wonderment and sadness into poems that map radiant intimacies and flickering bonds. Her vivid and exact phrasing streamlines lines, amplifies sonic pleasures. Syllables tick forward beautifully: “Gutting this love, I listen for the grind/ still.” Paper, Cotton, Leather is an exhilarating and moving debut.

—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning

Haunting as a fever dream, this debut collection from Jenny Sadre-Orafai is at once tender and bold, vulnerable and unflinching. Paper, Cotton, Leather, an intimate look at a relationship unraveled, marries immaculate craftsmanship and tensile language to create poems that vibrate with their urgency. The brevity of Sadre-Orafai's poems belies an elegant narrative arc that is compelling in its universality and heartbreaking in its honesty. 

—Kelly Davio, author of Burn This House

Beginnings are scary, first steps or first steps away, but it is that foundational and fundamental energy which infuses the poems in this book, causes them to glow at the seams. Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s poetry, each line of it, creates a fragile and halting world. Her poems are so painful and playful, so fractured and effervescent, that I completely forget to be terrified about life’s beginnings and endings.

—Nate Pritts, author of Right Now More Than Ever

The specter of divorce haunts Sadre-Orafai’s debut, although Paper, Cotton, Leather is much more than a lyrical response to loss. Paper, Cotton, Leather is an instruction manual for the amateur anthropologist, the domestic ghost-hunter, and the doomsday prepper. In “Retract or Recant,” Sadre-Orafai writes: "I was taught curve into the slide/when spinning on frozen road.” This is exactly what Paper, Cotton, Leather can teach us: how to navigate the heart’s switchbacks, how to survive a spin-out on its loneliest back roads.

—Shelley Puhak, author of Guinevere in Baltimore

REVIEWS

"Paper, Cotton, Leather are poems that speak to the calm after the storm—the electricity lingering in the air with each word, the intensity still a holding memory." — Peter Mason, Online Sundries

About the Author

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of four poetry chapbooks—Weed Over Flower (Finishing Line Press), What Her Hair Says About Her (H_NGM_N Books), Dressing the Throat Plate (Finishing Line Press), and Avoid Disaster (Dancing Girl Press). Her poetry has appeared in H_NGM_N, Gargoyle, Rhino, Redivider, PANK, Mount Hope, Sixth Finch, iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, and other journals. Her creative nonfiction has been published in The Los Angeles Review, South Loop Review, and The Rumpus. She co-founded and co-edits the literary journal Josephine Quarterly. She lives in Atlanta and is an Associate Professor of English at Kennesaw State University.