The Fault

Marcela Sulak’s The Fault sings to a universe in verse that mournfully and beautifully accounts for its fault lines, its rift, its broken notes. Reading Sulak feels like watching a poet “tunneling out from the weeds in the garden” with a secret in her arms. Something pulled from the root. Something wounded and exquisite. Something that could even feed us.
—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily

The Fault presents a world we recognize—a speaker gardening, navigating a new relationship, furnishing a home—but through the alchemy of Marcela Sulak’s inventive and quirky vision, this recognizable world is revealed to be magic and surprising. Sometimes surging with the dark power of a fairy tale, sometimes verging on surreal, we meet a Step Mother who confides, “We are throwing / the new house a party, so it will know who its mommy / and daddy are.” Charged with humor, simmering with just-off-kilter antics, these poems show Sulak having an awfully good time, and the reader can’t help but join her.   
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs 

The Fault conjures the many injuries and meanings buried in the word “fault,” such as inadequacy, geological fissure, accident, and, most importantly, responsibility. Marcela Sulak is at the peak of her poetic powers and we lucky readers are presented with the gorgeous puzzle of a world: everything is real, and everything is fable. A family-made down comforter is filled with “nightmares” and must stay in the closet. A lover and his family keep rerouting the speaker’s ability to offer herself fully while domestic symbols circulate transformed by Sulak’s deft repetition—nests, rings, spiders, and wire fences. Here, wife and husband—metaphorical and otherwise—meet to fault each other. Truthful surrealisms abound, like landmines or dreams. Through these poems, she wonders if our human faults and gaps are what build a version of love that is gorgeous, sometimes painful, and ultimately more faithful to the love/danger of family making. As Sulak writes, “[a] soul rehearsing death, or a pre-soul rehearsing life” is the singular answer to the question of who we are.

—Connie Voisine, author of The Bower, and Calle Florista