Days of Earthly Exile

Alexandra Sashe is a poet whose work is filled with a kind of religious ecstasy, and whose work is influenced by the poetry of Paul Celan and, spiritually, by the mystical thinkers of the Eastern Church. Her background in four different languages infuses the entire book, leading to surprising but evocative discoveries as she stretches the resources of English, her second language, making it do things that are not always natural to it, but which need to be expressed in this way: poetry often attempts to express the unsayable, to explore the inner reaches of experience through language, and Alexandra Sashe's work goes further along this uneven path than most of her contemporaries.