Author’s photo by Jay Penfold.

Tight Bindings by Sarah Temporal, Puncher and Wattmann 2024, was launched by Emilie Zoey Baker at Poets Out Loud Murwillumbah on 15 August 2024 .

I have known and watched Sarah for a long time – we go way back to the early 2000s, when we both thought wearing socks on our arms was a cool fashion choice. I’d also like to throw in that I once wore tampons hanging around my hat like an old Australian bushman. Or just an old Australian bush.

Over the years, I have watched Sarah write, perform, slam and create beautiful work. I have watched her win multiple awards, and I have watched as she helped pave the way for many young people to do the same. I’m so proud of all she has done and achieved. And now she has this beautiful collection of poems to add to her growing list of achievements.

Sarah, as you all know, is as sharp as glass on the stage, but she will also give you paper cuts on the page.

These poems are tight, decisive, purposeful and deliberate. If this collection were a dish, it would be chef-level diced. It serves precision, humour and beauty in abundance.

From exploring the dark truth nestled inside fairytales, to courageously challenging and reinterpreting the narratives deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness. From birth to love to sex to sickness to family to death. There’s even a “fucking huge” vagina.

There’s a line in Tight Bindings that reads:

I want to tell the story with feelings,
not words.

and although there are, of course, plenty of words, the feelings are there, stamped in invisible ink between each line. And as you read them your eyes become the lemon juice uncovering all these little secrets.

We start with a birth and we end with the beginning of a life. We travel across time and delve into place, from the Kimberley back to Murwillumbah.

In the poem “Five pictures of my father chopping wood”, she describes her father springing wood apart: the way it splits, the way it effortlessly cracks, like he just looks into tree-flesh and says, “Break”.

She writes:

I notice
it is this. This
is what I must describe
about my father.

In the opening poem, about the birth of her daughter, she writes:

Her tiny nose….. presses my cheek
her eyes….. seek me out
like she
has given birth
to me.

There’s a heavenly honestly in those poems, one that hovers above the Earth a little.

Across the pages, Sarah uses fairytales to weave us into the personal and the political. We meet the characters all we know so well, but in dark-lit rooms. We get to “smell” Rapunzel’s hair.

She writes of “Sweeping, sinful, susurrous hair… an aching of hair… a festering excess of hair… insomniac hair… a heaping tragic haystack… a clownish child’s fantasy of hair”. We don’t just get a portrait of Rapunzel, it’s like we get in the bath with her.

We meet the beasts, the beanstalks, the giants and the huntsmen.

We watch as Sarah twists her pen under the skin of these stereotypes, all the while weaving the personal in with the mystical. And these poems feel deeply personal.

This isn’t just a collection about examining the stories that bind us. This collection uproots the thorns of patriarchal constructs and sows the seeds of empowerment, self-actualisation and transformative change. In the words of Sarah on Cinderella: “We are older now, barefoot, and so much harder / to break”.

The themes delve into origins and history, mixing the modern with the ancient and the feminist with the traditional. Sarah endeavours to illuminate the intricacy, resilience and beauty of the feminine experience. Some have witch energy, some are written like spells, some like prayers.

In ‘The Rising’, she writes:

Look: these daughters are grown. They gather
all the children and limbs they have lost.
They press their voices back into their chests.
They carry dead hands in their canine teeth.

All of your daughters are rising now, see:
rising like embers, like flames. May the sound
of their blazing in the tongue-drunk night
stir you softly in your grave.

I circle back to the “father chopping wood”, the way he looked into the tree flesh and said, “Break”. This collection has that ease, like Sarah has looked upon the page and said: write. And oh, did they write.

It is my fulsome pleasure to officially launch Tight Bindings into the world.

 – Emilie Zoey Baker

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Emilie Zoey Baker is an award-winning Australian poet, educator, slam nerd and spoken-word performer who has toured North America, Europe and Asia as a guest of international festivals such as Montréal’s Festival Voix d’Amériques, the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali  (2010, 13/14/15) and Ottawa’s VERSEfest. Her poetry has been published widely in Australia and internationally, in journals such as Going Down Swinging,  Cordite,  Schriftstelle  (Germany) and Short Fuse (US), Page Seventeen, Best Australian Love Poems, Unusual Work, The Perfect Diary as well as in three Penguin anthologies, Yours Sincerely, Airmail and Between Us. Her Chapbook She Wore the Sky On Her Shoulders published by Hit&Miss as well as Bombora and Pixellations.  She’s published poems inspired by the films of David Lynch in the collections We Don’t Stop Here and A Slice of Cherry Pie (The Private Press, UK & US). She’s also the author of 14 children’s books published by Book Group Australia and her most recent, Dear All The Women Who Ever Existed Over The Entire Span Of Human History.

Tight Bindings is available from https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/tight-bindings/