Home - Sarah K Carey

Latest News

Go, little book, go!

The Grief Committee Minutes was named a finalist for the 2025 Eric Hoffer Award in the poetry category.

Wyeth's Women and Another Day's Inventory

Orienteering

Everywhere We Once Knew Wildness

Sinkhole

It's Common for Alzheimer's Patients to Reach for a Word

Nutritional Value

The Beach House Offers an Elegy

Survival Guide

Exploring Roots in the Hair Salon

What We Carry

What’s Left of Us Is Shaken

Books

"The Grief Committee Minutes"

(2024)

My debut full-length book of poems, The Grief Committee Minutes, is now available from Saint Julian Press! See the SJP press release here. Order now at now at Bookshop , Amazon or your favorite bookseller.

"Accommodations"

(2019)

Accommodations, winner of the 2018 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award, is available for orders via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound. Ordering information is also available at the Concrete Wolf website.

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"The Heart Contracts"

(2016)

Sarah Carey’s debut chapbook of poems, The Heart Contracts, is available for orders through Finishing Line Press and Amazon. Orders may be made online directly through the publisher’s website.

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About the author

Sarah Carey is an award-winning veterinary public relations specialist, science writer and Pushcart-nominated poet. A 40+-year veteran of journalism and communications, she recently retired from 35 years as director of communications for the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, and is now pursuing her poetry full-time. Sarah holds a master’s degree in English with a creative writing concentration from Florida State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals, including Gulf Coast, Sugar House Review, Grist, Five Points and Redivider, among many others. Her debut full-length collection of poems, The Grief Committee Minutes, from Saint Julian Press, was published in September 2024 and was a finalist for the 2025 Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her next collection, Bloodstream, will be published by Mercer University Press in 2026. She received the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award for her last chapbook of poems, Accommodations, (2019). She also is the author of another poetry chapbook, The Heart Contracts (2016).

Sarah Carey

From Readers

Reviews

On the timelessness of grief, Sarah Carey’s moving debut deftly captures the “end to means to end” by which “we let each other go.” With startling clarity, these poems detail multiple articulations of self and home that carry across generations, where loss is both finite and infinite. This thanatological collection thrills with beauty and its passing, with the ways the past is embedded in the present, and with the lives one attempts to rescue through memory. Its buoyant music dazzles and haunts

Chelsea Dingman Author of Thaw and I, Divided

This remarkable debut resides in a liminal space, striding between natural and spiritual realms. Sarah Carey doesn’t miss anything, not the blur of a peregrine wing nor the secrets of an ailing father. In some ways, The Grief Committee Minutes is a book-length elegy, mourning the poet’s lost family but also the fleetingness of life in general. We don’t get to stay in this beautiful, difficult space for long. Instead, ‘we learn to live, as Atlas did, with the heavens / holding each other, the world.’ This book teems with life even as it looks death in the eye, never flinching. A wild, wonderful collection of poems.

Erica Wright Author of All the Bayou Stories End With Drowned

How the past haunts us, even as life goes on. And how the birds—ah, the birds—match us, tapping and feeding and squabbling and, once in a while, showing us how to fly. Sarah Carey flies in this book—her dead mother on her back, the past in all its complications, yes, but fly she does. The poetry, ‘the wing //my life careens on to its close.’ A good read.

Alice Friman Author of On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems

In her stunning debut, Sarah Carey offers a yearning litany of familial love, spirituality, and the inevitable loss and grief that defines the human condition. Carey’s tone is often curious, gentle, and accepting. “No one knows the ways / we let each other go,” she writes in “The Beach House Offers an Elegy.” But in the end, her tight command of language convinces readers that perhaps it is she who controls the world around her rather than the other way around.

Jennifer Karetnick Author of Inheritance With a High Error Rate, winner of the 2022 Cider Press Book Award

Sarah Carey’s luminous new poems reckon with our beautiful and broken world with the intimacy and precision of a writer at her peak. Daughter of a dying mother and a threatened Earth, she grafts truths that root her and her readers in shared history, place—and the strength to rise like the pines and swallow-tails on these pages. “Why rebuild?” Carey asks in an electrifying hurricane poem. This collection holds the answers, and all that is dear.

Cynthia Barnett Author of Rain and The Sound of the Sea