By Bethany Schultz Hurst

Sarah Green’s second poetry collection, The Deletions (University of Akron Press, 2025), considers how to reckon with loss on a spectrum from personal to global—from divorce to violence, mortality, and ecological crisis. “How can I stay in this body?” asks the speaker in “The Afterlife.” The question reverberates throughout the collection: How can we contain our many griefs, or expect our fragile bodies to contain us as we grieve?

In many ways, the book itself seems organized into a neat container. Divided into three sections of similar length, most of its poems are one-pagers, often using conventionally-punctuated stanzas of equal length. Resisting that containment, though, are several outliers, sectioned poems that span multiple pages, sometimes—as in the case of “My Liver”—eschewing formal punctuation. While numbered sections in poems like “The Afterlife” suggest a sense of order, sentences spill mid-phrase over the section breaks. Green aptly uses these less cohesive forms when the integrity or safety of the physical body feels most precarious, as when the speaker is diagnosed with ovarian failure, undergoes a biopsy, meditates on violence against the female body, or confronts a death so recent that the departed still feels physically present.

The briefer poems, too, subtly push against containment. In “Arrhythmias,” the speaker’s heartbeat is monitored remotely from Bangalore, which allows the poem to move out of the confines of the speaker’s bedroom, across the world, and then beyond it to the machinery of the Mars Rover. Again and again, the poems pull their speakers out of the small rooms of personal concern into more expansive considerations. The sound of singing draws the speaker’s attention from her lover and the “diorama” of their bedroom. An anxious search for a lost button gives way to a fantasy that the dead girl once featured on xeroxed “Missing” fliers can be still recovered: “I keep seeing her in the river / gathering every lost thing. Her good news / waiting like a penny on her tongue.”

The poems also work to complicate and expand themselves in terms of viewpoints and tone. Their seemingly snug autobiographical stances are often undercut by questions about the speaker’s role. One of the book’s opening poems, “Blueberries for Sal,” makes this uncertainty its subject, intertwining the identities of caretaker and child: “You grow confused, think you were Sal. / . . . You think you’re thawing cans of Minute Maid for some child, / but you’re the child.” In the book’s second section, the poem “Women’s Studies” enacts a similar kind of identity dislocation. The opening phrase, “In this storyline,” suggests that there might another storyline in which the speaker plays a
different role, in which she experiences violence at the hands of a stranger rather than safety and intimacy within a queer relationship. And later in the collection, as the speaker watches families sledding at the park, she can no longer imaginatively place herself within that scene of domestic coherence:

Where have I been?
Am I the fox at the park’s edge?

Grass where the snow’s worn off?
I watch the sleds,

and I’m no human in the scene.

While the poem conveys longing and isolation, there’s also power in the speaker’s dissociation from the human form. Unable to fit herself into the roles the scene contains, the speaker instead inhabits something “beyond.” If we cannot rely on our usual structures to contain us as we reckon with loss, something else may exist beyond those boundaries.

In some ways, The Deletions could be read alongside other works about dissolved domestic relationships, like Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap or Louise Glück’s Vita Nova. In terms of content and stance, it feels even more directly in conversation with Ada Limon’s The Carrying. In both collections, the speakers contemplate how to configure identity in context of infertility, while presenting personal experience as inextricably linked to a larger ecology. Both possess generosity in tone and an undercurrent of wry humor—though Green’s may be a little more self-indicting than Limon’s. For example, in “Fifty Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth,” the speaker admires a dove’s ability to be in the world without harming it, then ironically remarks: “Not to brag, but I can’t touch one wire / without bringing entire forests down.” Green’s collection is also a little more backward facing—not surprising, considering its often elegiac mode—with the book’s second section moving through recollections of adolescence and young adulthood.

But The Deletions does not stall out in the past; its reconsideration seems necessary for the speaker to move forward. Thus images that appear early in the book come back with new weight in the last section. For instance, in the book’s first poem, the speaker beseechingly pulls on a lilac as if it were a manifestation of a deceased loved one. By the last section, longing has given way to a terse acceptance, and though “lilacs pierce May through,” the speaker “doesn’t need to touch the wound.” The book’s last poem, “Panama,” coaxes acceptance into gratitude, beginning with a series of “thank you” statements directed toward her ex. At the poem’s close, the speaker recalls being creekside with her now-ex, observing a fish that “wasn’t a shadow—that steelhead twisting in the water, / trying but failing to disguise itself against the shale.” The image of vulnerability and survival is even more powerful here because it calls back to an earlier poem in which the adolescent speaker, cast out of her house in anger, shelters behind a rose trellis that “[disguised her] as its shadow.” The overlapping imagery of shadow and disguise creates a poignant lyric movement through time, conjuring the speaker’s isolated adolescent self back to the banks of a river where her future self has experienced tenderness and intimacy.

While The Deletions contemplates what is threatened or has been lost, it also honors what existed and what remains. Exploring questions of loss, grief, and containment, the book enacts its own answer—that through careful attention, through movements outside of our singular perspectives, we might find consolation beyond the limits of what we’ve previously conceived.

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Bethany Schultz Hurst is the author of Blueprint and Ruin (Southern Indiana Review Press), winner of the 2021 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, and Miss Lost Nation (Anhinga Poetry Prize, Anhinga Press), finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Narrative, and The Gettysburg Review. She lives in Pocatello, Idaho, where she is a professor at Idaho State University.