Sara Greenslit


The Blue of Her Body
$16

The Blue of Her Body

Winner of the 2005-06 Starcherone Fiction Prize

Suffering from depression, a young woman leaves her lover, Kate, and flees the city where they lived, taking a job at an aviary. There, she learns how to handle birds of prey--hawk, kestrel, owl, eagle. Living alone, she dissects the path of her illness and her history with antidepressants. Beauty, wilderness, and danger are intertwined for a woman whose desire is nonetheless identifiably human: "All my life I have wanted my hands on a living thing." Artfully building powerful and poetic scene upon scene, The Blue of Her Body creates a memorable portrait of the human heart and its untamable nature, and the wonders of the activity of the human imagination we call love.


“The Blue of Her Body negotiates the difficulties of the muted raptures of love for a woman who anchors her life with raptors on the one hand and mood elevators on the other. In elliptical and lyrical fragments, Greenslit brings very real daily struggles into the domain of art, rendering them resonant and making them, somehow, all the more real. A powerful first novel."   Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain, and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Brown University, in selecting the winner of the 2006 Starcherone Fiction Prize

“Experimental in syntax and structure, The Blue of Her Body maps a young woman's love for the natural world and her struggle with familial depression. Greenslit borrows from an array of sources, stalks her subjects with a poet/ documentarian's eye, registers shifts in diction, fractures time. Yoking ornithology and psychology, her achievement is a fictional, postmodern field guide to surviving genetics and making a home in language and world."   Robin Becker, author of Domain of Perfect Affection

“Language is a bird in this novel - at times warm, close, pulsing in the hand, at others flying, soaring in the space of the unsayable. Like Carole Maso, Sara Greenslit is an artist who makes the muteness of the body, of the world, sing.”   Elizabeth Sheffield, author of Gone



ISBN 0-9788811-0-9 ISBN-13 978-0-9788811-0-8
Print run: 2,000 Price: $16.00
Official release: APRIL 15, 2007
Contact: Ted Pelton, Starcherone Books, PO Box 303, Buffalo, NY 14201. Phone: 716-885-2726. Fax: 716-884-0291. ted@starcherone.com
Distribution through Small Press Distribution, Baker & Taylor, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, etc.
Book tour: New York, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Madison; other cities TBA



Sara Greenslit has an MFA in Poetry from Penn State University. She has received grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and from the Barbara Deming Foundation/Money for Women, and a residency at Soapstone in Nehalem, Oregon. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Quarter After Eight, Rio Grande Review, and Salt Hill. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is a veterinary student at University of Wisconsin. This is her first novel.