Crevices by Sara Florian, “a passport into many worlds” of “savagery” and musical aspects of life

GREAT BAY, St. Martin (July 3, 2023)—Crevices by Sara Florian is a new poetry book that is as much about “savagery” as it is “musical,” said Jacqueline Sample, president of House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP).

Crevices were just published here by HNP and are available at Arnia’s Bookstore, SPDbooks.org (https://rb.gy/j86wp), and Amazon. Florian, an Italian writer, and Caribbean literary scholar, teaches at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

“Revealed through her emigrant eyes—the Caribbean, USA, Stockholm, Brussels, Paris, Barcelona, Hộ ội An, Venice, Australia, Singapore—poems lift off the pages” in Florian’s Crevices, said Australian author Geoff Goodfellow.

“Sara does not shy away from writing movingly of the violence and savagery that is so often caught in life’s crevices,” said Goodfellow, himself a legendary, no holds barred performance poet.

The 96-page collection could also remind us of something else. “Sometimes, a book comes along that rides you back to that wonder, a wandering moment when you first fell in love with poetry. Crevices is such a book,” said Singaporean poet Felix Cheong.

The award-winning Cheong sees Florian’s debut volume as “a passport into many worlds – mythical, mysterious, mystical, and above all, musical,” with keen “attention to sound, as much as meaning and form.”

Sara Florian holds a doctorate in modern philology from Ca’ Foscari University, Italy. She studied literature and criticism at Singapore Management University and at The University of the West Indies research facilities in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados.

Florian has been a guest author at St. Martin Book Fair and the International Poetry Festival of Medellín. Her writings have appeared in World Literature Today, The Sunday Gleaner, Prometeo, The Caribbean Writer, and Tripwire.

Florian’s work has been reviewed in La Nuova, Italy; Nouvelles Semaine, Guadeloupe; Kaieteur News, Guyana; 103rd Meridian East, Singapore/Russia; and The Straits Times, Singapore.

While teaching Italian at NUS, Florian wrote librettos for operas, and her poetry was shortlisted for Catharsis – Poetry Festival Singapore. Caribbean Counterpoint: The Aesthetics of Salt in Lasana Sekou is her critical study of contemporary Caribbean literature.