In The World is Mostly Sky, Sarah Ens bewitches us with broken robin eggs and belly button rings, silos and steeples, stones and stars. This stunning debut bursts with transfixing hosannas for an eerie coming of age–and with “purple-tongued” benedictions that sing the “in/breaking divine”. Ens’ poems have a contagious and fierce intensity, akin to an intimate conversation between the closest of friends. Her poems haunt. They ricochet. They pierce and shine.

When Sarah Ens calls–no, screams–into the silo of selfhood, unexpected hollows sound–organ pipes, beer bottle throats, amethyst supplements, plastic tongues, taxidermied bear heads, self-extracted teeth. I can’t shake the image of a girl’s echo returning to her as her own older voice.

Ens’ vibrating debut gnaws inside the dark vat of a prairie girl’s becoming. These poems are thorough, intimate, fiercely sensual processes, “tiny gnathic movements / digesting disaster”. In The World Is Mostly Sky, Ens takes the world by mouth, turning submerged matters into spit-back, unroofed, fully-lit desires. Throw away the old Hitchcock femme fatale script. Ens’ debut is “one true scream”.

These sharp, smart poems are embodied in the truest sense: of and faithful to the body. Whether she’s writing of girl- or womanhood, of the prairies or the city, Ens’ vivid, forceful language fully engages and challenges her readers.