Flyway

• Shortlisted: 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry
• Shortlisted: Margaret McWilliams Award for Popular History
• Shortlisted: McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award

None have rendered the wrenching of war’s dislocations with such intensity and beauty as Sarah Ens. Flyway is sorrow artfully spun into a lyric that mends as it quests, gathers, scatters, and laments. Her family’s story of the all too common women’s flight for survival emerges with intimacy and urgency. This book is a triumph for any time, but savor it now, as power and grace in a troubled world.

—Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Flyway situates itself as a poem in a biodiverse temporality where all species of home is rooted. Its address, O / downtrodden / stray, directed to those scrambling for purchase on a soft ridge of song is a balm so many people on the planet could use right now as they journey to be welcomed. The question that persists, that thrums beneath this poem is as simple and endangered as tallgrass: How do you remember home?

—Sue Goyette

Flyway charts the devastation and dislocation of war, a haunting that becomes an inheritance. Tracing migrations both inexorable and precarious, with the tallgrass as her teacher, Sarah Ens creates a work of imagination wider than the horizon.

—Laurie D. Graham

Flyway is a tender and urgent re-negotiation of place, displacement, memory, and war. The poems are elemental, touched by bread and metal, grass and stone.

—Benjamin Hertwig