“The lifeblood of connection is transition and a willingness to confront the violence we enact upon each other. Marcus offers this collection as confrontation. She harnesses the cruelty of the natural world to ask us, how is our violence different from that of the animals? Where do we converge and diverge in this natural, lived world? With this confrontation, there is a sense of transition, of coming into oneself that permeates the text. Just as the speaker is becoming, so are the poems. They are feeling around in the dark, craving connection. But these poetic bodies have learned to be skeptical, wary of the smell of another, so close. Theirs is a desire; as everyone around them is reluctant to acknowledge the past, the choir of memory raises its voice higher and higher.”

–Jen Fitzgerald, author of The Art of Work

“There are liminal spaces between dream and wake between real and fantasy there are blurred scratchy lines drawn in sand at high tide there is in the writing of Sarah Marcus tiny fissures in which one can see a warning of fire ants and one steps on the cracks to feel the intensity of the burn to experience the sensations of diving of being caught by a wind storm of floating just above the mouth of the bear who waits for everything to stop turning. Boundaries are road signs that signal wait and waiting is a game called dangerous and dangerous is a place in the den called love where every tongue is a moth and every moth is pregnant with need. What do we need but the spark to render the land where Nothing Good Ever Happens After Midnight.”

–Metta Sáma, author of le animal & other creatures (Miel 2015) and the year we turned dragon (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs 2016)

“Here, Marcus has crafted a collection of true wild(er)ness: lurking among the thicket of flora and fauna in these poems is the wild human heart – post-harm, mid-storm. If you’re brave enough, dear reader, dive in – but know that when a survivor, especially one as artful as Marcus, speaks, one shouldn’t expect resolutions or reassurances – perhaps “Only the wind trapped in corners whistling its violent escape.”

–Amy King, author of I Want to Make You Safe

Now available for purchase at: https://guidetokulchur.com/nothing-good-ever-happens-after-midnight-sarah-marcus