Lines powerfully enacts “a query into mass ache,” a restless catalogue, and an ecological reckoning. With acute precision, Riggs draws our attention to “ripples of grief in the eyelids”, “bodies of water hurtling about” and “a place of no answers.” She reminds us how our human need to pause has become in itself radical. This book is a gift in which we encounter the gravity of loss, “everyone’s death on your tongue tip”, “formally crying” and “what is required to let meaning through.” Lines is a brave and beautiful book which moves like nascent light to illuminate and change the dimensions of the “raw nest” in which poet and reader meet.
— Laynie Browne

Lines is a daybook in which the day as a measure frames and overflows its borders: we “know no beginning of endings.” These hypnotic poems display both the desire for a life that can be narrated as sequence and the breakdown of that possibility: “It was the continuance of tomorrow and it was today.” The question of how to tell time—or account for a life in sentences or numbers—returns and haunts. In answer, a “cinema verite of the unconscious,” associations not belonging to any one fly by, surprising in their multiple modes of address, diction, tone, question, statement. We listen to her beautiful talking to “the wind of it.”
— Susan Gevirtz

Sarah Riggs’s Lines reads like a seismograph for a speaker’s consciousness. The durational project of this dense, intellectual book follows Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and collates a selection of daily poems written between 2018 and 2020 during the end of the first Trump administration and the George Floyd protests. The unit of the book is the line and the book moves horizontally, at an angle, often combining qualities and affects you didn’t think could go together: a diary at once personal, mysterious, and abstract, a voice both decentered and frilly. The distanced language often intimates at some hidden subtext, perhaps turmoil in the family or the nation—and the diction shapeshifts in its registers, sometimes playful in its juxtapositions, then drolly technical or Augustan before becoming mysteriously fond of human connection or suddenly crystallized into a sonnet-like sharpness. Here is a mind writing letters to itself in all the porousness that entails.
— Ken Chen