If the Color Is Fugitive

In If the Color Is Fugitive, Sara Mithra reaches a hand into the past and pulls it around you like sudden weather. They manifest an American mythos of 19th Century prairie life that is also terribly real, a plainsong of mortality and survival in an immediate, human sense. This small book is brimming with narratives by characters who are literally scratching a living from the earth, and packed with lucid, worldly details that pull us out of our clock-run world. It’s a chorus of diverse and disarming voices, each of which strips away preconception and reveals, reveals, reveals.

—Richard Loranger

What’s the harm in slaughter? America needs / corset stays, parasol handles, sugar, china, fertilizer, buttons, pistol grips.” When you consider what’s happening in the United States right now, and read a story in a poet’s hand like that of Mithra’s, then it is no wonder that ever since colonization, America has unceasingly proven its own damnation. In If the Color Is Fugitive, Mithra brings us within hearing distance of the voices of its survival.

—Megan M. Garr

The poems in If the Color Is Fugitive are a time capsule that contain opposite elements. Intelligent yet folksy, sonically complex, playful and haunted, these snatches of Americana both tease and warn. Take this book in your hand, take the invitation into Mithra’s jerking, measured, heart-rent dance.

—C. Bain