“I never believed something, / or somebody, could hold me,” writes Sarah Kersey in the title poem of their debut collection, Residence Time (Newfound, Oct 2024). They hope the biblical Moses will offer them wisdom on his adoptive mother, even as the sea rises. Instead, Kersey teaches themselves to swim: “I finally learned to float.”
Residence Time is a glorious act of self-revelation. Kersey’s poetry sings a powerful lesson in liberating yourself from history without letting go of ancestry or yourself. Kersey holds solid footing in the poetry community as a finalist for the 2021 PEN American Emerging Voices Fellowship, and they are an alum of the Tin House Workshop. A local poet and x-ray technologist, they write in Chelsea, MA. It’s no coincidence that the language in Residence Time cuts with laser-sharp precision. Each poem lights up like an x-ray, visible to the bone. Lines bloom out of the body, invoking blood and breath. “Our hearts are the oldest things about us,” Kersey writes in “Transducer.” Their poetry sticks to you and rattles in your brain for days: “No one is welllit inside. / Can’t cough the dark out of a throat.” Residence Time begins with a heartbeat. “Before there was a word for me, or you, / there were hearts only 70 years from Africa. / They fluttered at the sound.” Kersey repeats this opening line in multiple poems, chewing on the brutal history of enslavement. Their repetition creates a living pulse as if to challenge this violence with survival: “We were not meant to survive / the departure.” Kersey demands a reckoning on behalf of the countless voices lost once colonizers divided the world through “me or you.” Their poetry calls you back to this separation, again and again, like a parting of the sea, a break in a bone, or a rupture in humankind.
Kersey remains skeptical of language and its misuse. Residence Time presses on a long history of injustice, accusing humans and gods alike. In “Signature,” the “ancestors, under a gibbous moon, / bowed their heads to the ground, / read the Bible their masters misread.” A complicit God floods them with “His searchlight. / It was arresting.” In a single word, Kersey unloads a coiled spring. This God is not only “arresting,” as in astonishing. This God is “arresting,” as in a policing force. How do you trust a world under such a God, under such violence? Kersey testifies through poetry, writing about religious and historical betrayal with generosity. They ascend on the same imagery, reclaiming spiritual language for themselves. But Kersey acknowledges that words feel inadequate when bearing witness. “When I speak, my words are not big, / but infinitesimal testimony.” Their poems investigate a world that stretches and shrinks proportion, depending on who holds the pen.
So Kersey returns to the body, again and again. They revive Moses – and this time – channel him to swell as large as the ocean: “I part my lips like the Red Sea.” Kersey opens their mouth, and a new faith in their own voice pours out. A book becomes part of the body, a “stitched fist / which tears threads / to point a / finger.” When the collective fight for liberation feels too large, Kersey reminds us that we can free ourselves as individuals over and over. Kersey accuses the fathers who failed them, both by blood and religion. “I stop thinking of God as a father. / I’ve never seen God / and I haven’t seen my father.” Self-liberation transforms into a sacred act. When a father fails, the child recovers gracefully. Kersey’s speaker accuses the father, “How many women / have you loved in your life, Bobby? / Two? Three? Five? / I have only loved one: my mother. / I miss her today. / Our love transcended blood.” Toward the end of Residence Time, Kersey clutches Moses’s rod and stops asking for advice. “Everybody will focus on the miracle / of the Red Sea, / but no one will know how / I also freed my mother.” By the closing poem in the collection, the speaker goes a step further, ruling themselves: “I conquered / my body and led it / as a slave.”
Who cares about miracles when we have poets like Kersey? They are the miracle workers we need right now, parting a clear path ahead. •
Residence Time is available on Newfound.org for pre-order. Available on October 7, 2024, in e-book and print.
