Dress Made of Mice

A long time ago, when I was real, I tried on A Dress Made of Mice. It is a dress covered in a thin layer of fur so ancient and alive, slipping into it casts a spell on dear reader, turned my one heart into three: gave me a ghost heart, an animal heart, and kept my own heart true. Erotic, and dangerous, and strange, this dress leaves behind the scent of fossil and fable, ＂ its thousands skins fluttering ghost gray.＂ When I slipped it off, I swear I heard it say: ＂ Come back from the dead and write one more thing.＂ Its ＂ teeth left a perfect circle on my thigh.＂ I don’t know where Messer gets her golden needles, or how she has stitched such a cloak of kindness and weep and tremble. I dare you to find out. I dare you to try it on. - Sabrina Orah Mark

Sarah Messer has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Michigan Council for the Arts and others. She is the author of four books: two poetry collections, Bandit Letters (New Issues, 2001), Dress Made of Mice (Black Lawrence, 2015), a history/memoir Red House (Viking, 2004), and a book of translations, Having Once Paused, Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (University of Michigan Press, 2015). In 2008-2009, she was a Poetry Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. For many years she taught in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Currently she runs One Pause Poetry (onepausepoetry.org) in Ann Arbor, Michigan and works at White Lotus Farms.