Sarah Messer

Sarah Messer (born 1966) is an American poet and author. She was raised in Marshfield, Massachusetts, in the Hatch Homestead, a house built in the 17th century that was the subject of her book Red House: Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England's Oldest Continuously Lived-In House.

Messer earned undergraduate and master's degrees from Middlebury College and the University of Michigan, respectively. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in the Department of Creative Writing.

Works

• 2001 Bandit Letters: Poems, poetry collection (ISBN 1-930974-08-6)
• 2004 Red House: Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England's Oldest Continuously Lived-In House, memoir (ISBN 0-670-03315-4)

Quotes

• From the beginning I could tell / that you were a woman who would braid my beard / to the bed-post, stick her hair pins in butter, salt the sheets thinking / I was a house wren, a simple bird to catch. (From "Reasons why he may not have returned", in Bandit Letters, p. 31.)

• The house contains both the living and the dead, and there are always traces, because the house is not separate, has not one owner but many, has many beams, many different panes of glass, the way a body might have many lovers, the way each owner might look at the house as if at the body of a lover. If the window is removed, is it still a part of the house? If the fireplace swing-arm is taken and put in a museum, is it no longer a part of the house? Can the house be removed from itself? The owner, the past, the parts of the house. I thought: Who can steal a house? Who owns the lover but the loved? (From Red House, p. 234.)

External links

• Author's official web site
• Two Poems at Guernica Magazine