Book Review: Sarah Cavar Has Two

by Scott Neuffer

Олег Мороз

Sarah Cavar is a fresh force in modern lit. Those familiar with their work know they bring vivid poetic energy to the page along with a scalpel-sharp analytical mind — the mind of a literary theorist deconstructing notions of gender and identity mixed with the sensibility of a surrealist poet. Cavar has two new prose chapbooks that together offer a deep dive into the human psyche — riveting and unforgettable.

A Hole Walked In, Sword and Kettle Press, 2021

“Four days bleeding” begins this searing speculative microchap. “I stand before a dying Hollister inside a cryptfreeze mall.” The setting is late-stage capitalism, and the narrator can’t stop bleeding from their face. From this frightening premise, Cavar both satirizes American capitalist society and offers a harrowing body-horror allegory. The narrator is solicited by a modeling agent, told they’d be perfect for a shoot, despite their grotesque bleeding. Besides the mall, the narrator visits a gym, careful not to get blood on their “pristine Nikes.” They parade through the street, “a jilted bride-turned-demon by nightfall. Miss Havisham before she went moldy.” It’s as if the gaze of American culture is shaping our bleeding protagonist to its monstrous whims and norms — not just the gaze of men, but of cisgendered women and the whole heteronormative apparatus of consumerism. The real horror isn’t the bleeding, but the erasure of our narrator as their agency is systematically reduced, “the more irritated is the edge of my forgetting.” They ultimately play the part they’re being cast. “They praise my bloody bridewalk,” they proclaim near the end.

A Hole Walked In is at once terrifying and fantastic. A work of genius.

The Dream Journals, giallo, 2021

There’s also a mall — and a gym — in this exploratory chapbook comprised of several vignettes and notes about the narrator’s dreams. A similar theme emerges: the insidious nature of conformity. The narrator sees a “disused bookshelf. All the books are blue, hardcover, identical.” Their father repeatedly appears as a symbol of punishment and repression. In one dream, the father takes credit for trash strewn about the house: “My father tells me it was him. I ask why. He says it is payback. I’m covered in grease.” But something is breaking free from the grip of patriarchy. The most interesting dream is one in which the narrator is at the top level of a tall building labeled “sexuality.” “We, a class, toured the building’s facilities, eating salad with dressing and plenty of tomatoes and wide, seeded brown bread with crumb-covered butter. I felt an inexplicable sense of fear, of requisite restraint.” That a hurricane comes and rips them from the building could symbolize many things, but the beauty of this book is that it talks in powerful surreal images. Like later, when the narrator, experiencing body alienation, eats “dark, bloody beets, whole and raw, from a dish in my lap.” This book ends where A Hole Walked In began, in the strange, empty horror of late-stage capitalism: “I was in my hometown, all dark grey, face mask on. Tried to pump gas into the car that was not mine until my father came to relieve me. We walked together into the gas station with no clerk, no candy, no restroom.”

The Dream Journals further demonstrates that Cavar is a writer to watch — fearless, fiercely honest, immensely talented — a writer on the cutting edge.