Long Island Sad Poems

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella's poetry collection, Long Island Sad Poems is now available for purchase.

In Long Island Sad Poems, Jane-Rebecca Cannarella explores sadness in its multitudes: sweet nostalgia, bitter adulthood, love lost, and time gone. Through the luminosity in pizza places in West Philadelphia, a freezing apartment, a childhood jelly donut, Cannarella’s writing is as magical as it is palpable. More than dualities, she explores the complexities of love; there is something both eternal and poignant about her observations: “Love, in its celestial form, / doesn’t need to be seen to be felt.” and “like how love in bad / movies and in churches / is defined by pain.” This collection, then, can be characterized by its vulnerability and craft, and not only fellow sadgirls, but anyone with a heartbeat, will recognize its truth. 

—Alison Lubar, author of Philosophers Know Nothing About Love, queer feast, sweet euphemism, It Skips a Generation, METAMOURPHOSIS, and The Other Tree...

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella blurs the boundaries between us and the environments we swim in. Water is the link, much of it salt, flavor of tears and the sea. A slanted connection of the poems with their titles kicks up the reader’s visual imagination. Desperation is rendered almost casually––loneliness following self-harm, soup from a can two years expired. Sudden turns into tender humor give us dancing bears in a batch of eggs mid-scramble, speculation on the afterlife of cats, the romance of a solar eclipse. And it takes a poet’s special attention to create a meadow from a handful of grass clippings in a barren garage.

—Anne-Adele Wight, author of An Internet of Containment

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella’s Long Island Sad Poems swims at the cusp between a childhood where we each “smell green and appear golden,” where we lick our “lips, tasting how New Year’s Eve would feel in the future” and an adulthood where “love in movies and in churches is defined by pain,” where “the ruins are in secret places,” and where we “bite down on sandwiched pointer and middle fingers to remember our voices.” There is decay and sickness in the way we have scratched the freckles off our faces, but also a hope that the lunar eclipse unfolds in a romantic rond de jambe even behind the clouds. God still exists “because of fingerprints, and how each dogs’ nose has a unique pattern.” This is a book of escape, unwrapping, and opening through each lover’s fight or forlorn hangover. We lift each baby bird from the ground into our hands. At the end of this collection, we are all holding the “charred (and beating) heart of a ballon boy who died at sea.”

—Scott Ferry, author of 500 Hidden Teeth