In This Distance Volume 39

Brooke Sahni is the author of Before I Had the Word (TRP, 2021), which won the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Divining (Orison Books, 2020), which won the Orison Chapbook Prize. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly, Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, Verse Daily, 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the high desert mountains of Arizona.

“Brooke Sahni pulls off the damn near impossible with this book: elegant, precise, and piercingly aware poems about love and the erotic. A lot of poets treat these subjects as kryptonite. Those who tackle them usually fall into traps. Not here. Sahni’s brilliant exploration is unflinching and unearths a goldmine of wisdom, one as luminous as it is enthralling.” - Hayan Charara, author of These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit“Brooke Sahni’s In This Distance gathers the great branches of existence—love, family, connection; hunger, spirit, ritual; risk, betrayal, loss—into the pyre of sensuality. It’s a stirring collection of odes (and O!) to Esther Perel and Audre Lorde, two of our culture’s foremost goddess-scholars of desire, alongside 21st century love poems: Sahni’s work is intimate, pansexual, feminist, self-aware, fragmented, orgasmic. In This Distance is a carnal prayer book full of lines as beautifully wrought as bobbin lace, lines of ‘sacred tenderness’ and the blinding light of a woman surrendering to her own vast erotic power.” - Arielle Greenberg, author of I Live in the Country & Other Dirty Poems