Description
Book SynopsisIn Say, Sarala Estruch explores the limits of language in the face of overwhelming loss and attempts to forge a language with which to probe subjects that still remain largely taboo: grief, childhood bereavement, the challenges and possibilities of cross-cultural and interracial relationships, mixed-race identity, colonialism and its aftermath. A pamphlet that exists in the spaces left vacant by the silences in the stories that parents and grandparents tell us; Say casts a slant light on the scars our ancestors carry, both those we inherit and those we choose to leave behind.
Trade Review"Sarala Estruch’s extraordinary debut flows from the question posed by Audre Lorde: 'What do you need to say?' From these engrossing, wise, surprising poems, we learn about the poet’s struggle to 'coax words from hiding', but also about need: the need to speak, the need to hold back, the need for closeness - whether across the threshold of the page, or across the gulf of death. Say is the work of a spellbinding storyteller, who pieces together a cloth shot through with silences: old griefs, family secrets, the blindspots around race and colonial history from which our culture still turns away. 'Still, I’m not brave enough to ask', the poet regrets of her younger self. These poems shine with that bravery: I will come back to them again and again." -- Sarah Howe; "Sarala Estruch's Say grieves, is grief, gives grief its echo. Here a father is not lost but binds the daughter in an intricate web of mourning for home, language, belonging as well as love. The poems make uncanny crystalisations in a transformative image, a rhythm, a fragment, swelling with empathy. The poet speaks with two voices, wishes them into one, and what is said fractures language in its frame." -- Sandeep Parmar
