Description

Read a sample from this book.

Read reviews and an interview:
Rob Stanton’s review on Jacket2
rob mclennan’s blog
Interview @ rob mclennan’s blog

“The compact, often uncannily startling poems in Sarah Campbell’s WE USED TO BE GENERALS are precisely composed language acts set at cocked angles. Sudden as aphorisms, they unsteady the mind in order to open it to myriad particular yet paradoxical shock-effects in our persistently contemporary world.”—Susan Howe

“Each turn of phrase is a phrase turned in on itself, on ourselves; we are apart from the throng, but a part of it. These stunning, terse poems, ‘like small incendiary device[s],’ threaten to explode our dearly-held notions of individuality and community, making room for a world in which we are allowed to say, and mean, and perhaps even be, two things at once.”—Sasha Steensen

“Every word herein is detail. Every detail is the whole. ‘Enough was never enough’—& our attention is maintained at a point of intense energy & acutely skilled quiet. I read this book & when I went to bed that night I read the afterimages of Campbell’s poems inside my eyes.”—Pattie McCarthy

Sarah Campbell’s other books include Everything We Could Ask For (2010) and The Maximum(2008). Her literary criticism has appeared in Jacket 2, Arizona Quarterly, and The Golden Handcuffs Review. Radio pieces have aired on WNYC, WBFO, and as podcasts for the Poetry Foundation. She lives in New York.