In this shining debut, identity and community converge in poems for a modern generation. Beginning with the open prairie skies of her youth, Sarah Ens maps an emergence into millennial womanhood, questioning feminine expectations and examining heartache and disembodiment during an age of personal and planetary upheaval. The World Is Mostly Sky looks backwards and inwards to find respite in stars, warm earth, and deep waters while rejoicing in the sacred bonds of sisterhood that offer the courage to meet our uncertain horizon.

Sarah Ens is a writer and editor based in Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg, MB). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Poetry Is Dead, Room Magazine, and SAD Mag. Her debut collection of poetry, The World is Mostly Sky was shortlisted for the 2021 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Flyway is her second book of poetry.

Sarah Ens' profile page

• Long-listed, McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award
• Winner, Room Magazine Poetry Contest

In The World is Mostly Sky, Sarah Ens bewitches us with broken robin eggs and belly button rings, silos and steeples, stones and stars. This stunning debut bursts with transfixing hosannas for an eerie coming of age-and with "purple-tongued" benedictions that sing the "in/breaking divine". Ens' poems have a contagious and fierce intensity, akin to an intimate conversation between the closest of friends. Her poems haunt. They ricochet. They pierce and shine.

When Sarah Ens calls--no, screams--into the silo of selfhood, unexpected hollows sound-organ pipes, beer bottle throats, amethyst supplements, plastic tongues, taxidermied bear heads, self-extracted teeth. I can't shake the image of a girl's echo returning to her as her own older voice.

Ens' vibrating debut gnaws inside the dark vat of a prairie girl's becoming. These poems are thorough, intimate, fiercely sensual processes, "tiny gnathic movements / digesting disaster". In The World Is Mostly Sky, Ens takes the world by mouth, turning submerged matters into spit-back, unroofed, fully-lit desires. Throw away the old Hitchcock femme fatale script. Ens' debut is "one true scream".

These sharp, smart poems are embodied in the truest sense: of and faithful to the body. Whether she's writing of girl- or womanhood, of the prairies or the city, Ens' vivid, forceful language fully engages and challenges her readers.