How to Abandon Ship

 
Cover image for How to Abandon Ship featuring art by Cai Guo-Qiang.

What People Are Saying:

In How to Abandon Ship, Sasha West emerges like a modern Cassandra, one who doesn’t simply tell us of what is to come, but one who teaches us, “To bite. To keen. To howl.” West is an oracle whose words pop, hiss, and blaze. This terrific book has left me changed.  –Tomás Q. Morín

The poems in Sasha West’s How to Abandon Ship describe the anguish and disorientation of existing on a planet put in jeopardy by our very existence. Here we encounter a poet who has “spent a life sharpening the blade of [her]/imagination” slicing through the layered voices of greed, complicity, and blind faith that have left us with a world in peril and the painful task of telling our children the truth about it. Embodying the voice of a modern-day Cassandra, West reveals a fundamental truth of our time: how a warning can be a blessing, but only if we’re willing to receive it.—Carrie Fountain

How to Abandon Ship is equal parts prophetic and apocalyptic, and Sasha West doesn’t shy away from the exigencies of the world: its floods and fires and earthquakes, its wars and disease and mass graves, its politics and tragedies and technology where “software reminded us / to have memories.” “I love: my country: it can break me,” writes West, and these powerful poems limn the urgency of our present moment, as well as the tenderness and terror of new motherhood when the speaker becomes “permeable to the world.” How to Abandon Ship is a haunting book of grief and warning, but also one of caregiving and survival. West’s poems ultimately offer a blueprint for meeting disaster head-on—with fierce love, acts of service, and the power of imagination. - Erika Meitner

Poems from book here