Sarah Levine's Each Knuckle with Sugar is a soft yet powerful deep-dive into love and grief told through multiple fascinating perspectives. This powerful collection looks at longing and grief with sensitivity and care. What does it mean for desire to be born out of loss ? How are relationships born? Each Knuckle with Sugar answers these questions with precise language and intimate details that pull the reader in close. In these poems, the complexity of love is teased out with the gentlest comb, revealing stark truths about connection . The precision of line breaks and word choice in this collection is stunning . These poems feature nature imagery mixed with incisive details about the body. In these pieces, love is an all encompassing and well-studied geography . Each Knuckle with Sugar is a quietly devastating but ultimately hopeful look at burgeoning love. Simply put, Sarah Levine has written one of contemporary poetry's strongest collections of poems about the mixture of grieving and loving . This collection also features a bespoke interview with the writer at then end of the book, delving deeper into the craft , influences , and life behind their work. "I love this book. [...] Look, some of its tanginess may leap off the page and startle your fingers. Some of its honey may stick to your knuckles. Let it." - Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency "I have been reading Sarah Levine's poems for the past decade and in this luminous first collection she fulfills the promise of her earlier work. Each Knuckle with Sugar explores the romantic relationship between Herman and Begonia who meet at his mother's funeral. Each poem in which they inhabit is vivid, lyrical, poignant, often passionate and always intimate. As their relationship matures the metaphoric language is never predictable, a touch eccentric and always blissfully original. Read these poems and I guarantee you will bask in their humanity and, ultimately, be transformed in the mystery of their elegance." - Kevin Pilkington, author of Playing Poker with Tennessee Williams "Sarah Levine's award-winning debut collection introduces us to Herman and Begonia, two people who embark on a love affair as they try to find a way out of a landscape stripped bare by loneliness and grief. There is a strangeness, an intensity, a blurring of the real and the surreal that makes this tale of love and loss intimate and authentic. Levine has a strong command of the image, metaphor and simile, that renders these poems vivid and dreamlike. If there is grief, there is also humor: Herman's lists of questions to ask Begonia on their dates are original, to say the least. As they speak in turn, in their fragmented voices, Herman and Begonia become achingly human, their need for love and their thwarted attempts at salvation all too familiar." - Martín Espada, author of Floaters Sarah Levine is a Pushcart Prize nominee and author of two chapbooks, Take Me Home, a finalist for the New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and Her Man (New Megaphone Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Passages North, Best New Poets anthology, Green Mountains Review, and The Paris American among other publications. She earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, MAT from Smith College, and BA from UMASS Amherst Honors College. Levine is a 2023-2024 Teachers for Global Classrooms Fulbright fellow and teaches 7th Grade ELA and 12th Grade AP Literature at Williston Northampton School where she currently holds the Richard C. Gregory Endowed Chair. Each Knuckle with Sugar won the Driftwood Press Open Reading Contest and is her debut collection. is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022), finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), longlisted for the National Book Award. Both books are published by BOA Editions and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK. His latest chapbook is Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). His honors include the Thom Gunn Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. His work appears in many publications, including Poem-a-Day and Ploughshares. His poems are also reprinted in many anthologies, including 100 Queer Poems, 100 Poems That Matter, three editions of The Best American Poetry, two editions of The Forward Book of Poetry, and The Norton Introduction to Literature (15th edition). Chen has taught at UMass Boston, the University of Southern Maine, Antioch University Los Angeles, and Brandeis University as the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. Currently he teaches for the MFA program at New England College. He edits the online poetry journals, Underblong and the lickety split. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from Texas Tech University. He l