Ann Van Buren

Site Specific: New & Selected Poems by Elaine Sexton. (Grid Books, 2025)

Reviewed by Ann van Buren. 978-1946830388

It is not often that a poet’s body of work merits a retrospective collection. Elaine Sexton’s does. The poems in Site Specific work together in harmony and amplify the significance of life in the latter half of the 20^th century and into the present. The title of the book, Site Specific, is a term that artists use to describe work integrally linked to geography. Think of Andy Goldsworthy’s stone walls to nowhere, or Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Sexton writes to a place in the head. “There is a specific moment where the poem is born,” she said in a recent conversation.  Specificity and heightened attention are essential to this body of work, and these components create an energy that propels the reader forward. These poems effect the feeling of moving through time and space rather than being subsumed by it.

I like the quiet strength of Sexton’s work. In this book, readers discover a poet who, like a supporting beam in a house, has been there all along and who represents what’s essential, but whose importance might not be so obvious without taking a deeper look. I encourage readers to spend time with Site Specific, to put it down, and then to pick it up again. These are not poems that clang for a moment and then go silent. They are poems that merit the same reflection that they offer to the world they describe. They are poems that stay with you and feel as though they’ve been part of you for a long while.

Although much of Sexton’s poetry references the arts — particularly visual art — her work does not wander into a rarified world. Through her writing, she speaks to colleagues who work to elevate other people’s creativity. These poems celebrate the office worker — the caring listener who overhears a conversation from her office cubicle (“Office Sonnet”). They record the shared emotions of ordinary people who see each other during life’s daily activities — as in the poem “Village Butcher.” When a poem describes something out of the ordinary — like a perilous moment driving on the edge of a mountain (“Transport”) it recreates the fear that accompanies every dangerous thrill — not for the sake of the thrill itself but to frame what’s familiar, the part of the inner-self that is common to all people when facing the unknown.

Formerly a senior editor at ARTnews and visual arts editor for Tupelo Quarterly, Sexton is also known for her handmade books, which she distributes generously and encourages others to create as well. It is therefore no surprise that Sexton’s work is steeped in the vocabulary of visual art. Many of her poems reference color, light, shape, and texture — which is part of the reason why they are so aesthetically pleasing. As I mentioned, the term “site specific” refers to artwork that relies on a particular “place” to exist. In Sexton’s case, that place appears when she is on the move. A regular commuter for decades, she is not a poet who has to wake up before dawn to exercise her writing practice. Poems written while on the bus, train, or in the car parallel life’s journey, and in their specific attention to detail Sexton takes readers with her as she discovers the way. The poem “Collage” applies the technique of collage to poetry. It also shows how a world of small and random details can be pieced together to form a coherent whole.

A series of stunning images arranged in couplets along the page make up the very painterly poem, “Recovered Blue.” Its form replicates patterns of waves and the quiet touch of the environment it describes. Here is an excerpt:

after a swim, a sliver
from a mollusk’s
 
lodge, bluer
than any painted blue,
 
deepest when wet,
hollowed by salt.

In addition to art and nature Sexton alludes to socio-political and historical events as well. Her poem “Code,” about Samuel Morse, calls out a few heinous details in what might otherwise have been considered an honorable life. Sexton reveals a man who did so much to foster cross-continental communication but who was racist and limited in his ability to accept and understand others. This poem addresses problems with the patriarchy, but perhaps more importantly, it is also about paradox. How could someone so brilliant, someone who created an international language, be so closed off?

Fundamentally, Sexton’s work stands out as that of a feeling person, a person who is in touch with what it means to be human. It is about communication and about what we encounter as we move through the world. I am struck by a tone of steady self-assurance and continuation — rather than the sense of disruption and change. References to the typewriter, paper, ink — remind us of the radical changes the world has seen over the past third of a century. However, as in the poem about Morse, Sexton focuses on what is extra-ordinary as a backdrop for emotions, sensations, and reactions that weave their way into our ordinary routines.  I appreciate how deeply personal Sexton’s poems feel, even as what she describes can apply to all of us, in general. We see this in poems that are elegies as well.

The poem, “A Bird in the House,” from her second book, Causeway, uses the symbol of the bird to convey an aged mother who is both trapped in her ailing body and on the edge of being released. The poem plays with reality and imagination, with this world and the one that calls us beyond. I love this poem because Sexton finds the place where borders meet and the ways in which interactions between people bring understanding to the world and to ourselves.

Like an architect designing a house, Sexton pays careful attention to what it will be like for readers to enter a poem. She creates a sense of intimacy with every measure. Even as her poems reach for what is beyond our earthly experience, Sexton takes us back to what we all know — those places within the realm of human emotion that create the authentic self. I highly recommend Elaine Sexton’s book, Site Specific: New & Selected Poems.

A Bird in the House

The knocking and knocking
in her washing machine
brought things sharply into focus
when I raised the lid and saw her daily laundry:
a single bra, its metal clasp
hitting the walls of her white Kenmore
over and over. I said, mother, there’s nearly
nothing in here. She busied herself at the sink
full of dishes unwashed for a week.
Shopping for bras that afternoon,
I joined her in the dressing room.
She couldn’t remember her size.
Not being a mother, I saw how I’d never know
the coming-of-age of a daughter, but,
instead, I’d be a daughter helping my mother
measure this gentle harness,
the first of many stays
we’d share and let go as she needed me.

2.

Late one night my mother called my brother:
a bird in her house and she couldn’t get it out,
even with her broom. He raced the dark mile
over the causeway and found no bird,
though together they thumped through every room.

She swore there is a bird, there is a bird in the house,
and the bird in her house was something
we whispered between us all week.
 
Mother, there is no bird, we said.
There is a bird, she said, there is a bird,
the first of many repetitions.
Maybe you know how this goes.
We turned back the clocks,
and the days turned mysteriously cold
along with the light. Her house, full of shadows,
showed how fear might draw a bird in the house.
I decided to visit more often.
A week later, alone with my mother,
I snapped on her light in the hall. An enormous
black bird knocked its frantic wings on the walls,
clawing the air over our heads.
I opened the heavy front door. It flew out.

Elaine Sexton’s collected poems span several decades. Site Specific: New & Selected Poems (Grid Books, 2025) begins with new work and gathers poetry from four previous volumes: Sleuth (New Issues, 2003), Causeway (New Issues, 2008) Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow Press, 2015,) and Drive (Grid Books, 2022). Sexton’s writing has been widely published in journals, anthologies, textbooks, and websites including American Poetry Review, Art in America, Poetry, Ploughshares, O! the Oprah Magazine, and Poetry Daily as well as in Plume.

Author: Ann Van Buren

Ann Van Buren lives in the Hudson River Valley, New York, where she works as a poet, educator, and activist. She is a graduate of Columbia University and holds a master’s degree in writing from New York University. She teaches poetry workshops in the U.S. and Europe. Ann’s work has been published by The Westchester Review, The Blue Door Gallery, THE, Santa Fe’s monthly magazine, and other journals. Her poetry book reviews can be found in The Rumpus.

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