Synopsis "The Book of Yona (in English)"
'Across an already diverse and courageously experimental body of work Cave has proved herself a poet and artist always worth anticipating with excitement. The Book of Yona is possibly her most extraordinary collection yet. A dizzyingly erotic, stricken and compassionate queering of the Song of Solomon which channels a displaced voice with hallucinatory clarity. As lucidly framed as it is, I experience a different collection each time I read it: sometimes deeply funny, the way true intimacy resolves into a kind of laughter of astonishment; sometimes quiet and moving in its hymnody and the sense of love as sacred ritual; sometimes burning with its conviction and the anger of the marginalised or censored. The poems draw so naturally on the hysterical-sublime and heightened expression of the Biblical text, juxtaposing this with perfectly pitched contemporary and everyday points of reference which never jar, but enhance the timelessness and force of the emotion. A stunning poetic, theological and erotic achievement, and a collection I know I will return to again and again - for inspiration, permission and insight - for the rest of my career.' -Luke Kennard'Witty and sensual, The Book of Yona invites us into intimacies of the feminine, queer and sacred with a holy jouissance. With verbal elasticity and playful fusions of time and geography, Sarah Cave traces a via negativa through secret truths that were there all along in the half-light of cedar branches, the archives, the anchorage... read and be drawn into companionship, divine encounter, love.' -Phoebe Power'Sarah Cave's collection is, by turns, sinuous, troubling and sensuous. Its central conceit - that Jesus's sister Yona is cursed to live until his return at the Apocalypse - is certainly ambitious, but is handled with real tenderness and humanity. Indeed, Cave interrogates the registers of queer desire, of faith and of bodies without ever losing sight of what Donne calls "Love's mysteries".' -Rachel Mann
