BUT TODAY IS DIFFERENT Review

Reviewed in Mom Egg Review, By Katrinka Moore

In BUT TODAY IS DIFFERENT, Sarah Stern writes in the ancient tradition of erotic mysticism while grounding her poems in familiar American life. This poetry is womanly, drawn from the midst of life. The speaker tends to her dying mother, applies for jobs, shops for suits at a mall, imagines how she’ll feel when her children leave home, and has wild sexual fantasies on the subway. Oh — and she has conversations with a mystical voice, a spiritual guide of sorts.

The different elements are braided together into a fully-lived, fully alive book of poems. Of course, what makes life so precious is the reality of death, and Stern faces it directly here. She revisits her mother’s last days and muses “[a]nother season without daddy.” She makes me fall in love with her mother, who “didn’t believe in God but in tradition, the geology of things” and answered the 13-year-old daughter’s questions about sex by asking, “Do you ever touch yourself?”

Awash in filial love, missing her parents, Stern writes:

Where did they go?
I’m not the same.
Who are you?

I don’t know.
I know that I love the not knowing.

Not knowing is at the heart of both mysticism and desire, feelings that can’t be explained by the intellect. The art of longing is also in both. Not knowing and longing are uncomfortable and can be cast aside in hectic daily life, yet they are essential to living engaged with the world. In “Decorated Generals” the speaker says

I want to be free from want
like before the snow came
and covered me in something
other than fire and ice.

And the spirit voice responds:

Let want be.

Like Sappho (as I read her) Stern writes of eroticism as both real and metaphorical. Unfulfilled desire “makes you see things,” the spirit voice says, and “changes you, makes you remember that you’re more than flesh and bone.”

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