What she wanted:
A beautiful book of poems
A single dream...
In January 2019, Sarah Flame wanted to realize her dream of publishing, and she reached out to us…way before she even finished writing. We connected on a phone call (and connected on that phone call). On January 31st, we began a powerful collaboration.
Goals goals goals
One of the amazing things about Sarah’s collection is that we were able to watch it blossom from a concept to fully crafted poems.
When Sarah came to us, she knew she wanted to publish this collection, and she set herself up with an ambitious goal: to write 65 poems across 3 sections.
And Sarah moved toward her goal with dedication—poems started to trickle in, and, by the end of April, she was on a roll. When Sarah went out of the country for a bit and hit pause on composition, we kept working on line-by-line critiques of the poems she had sent us . . . and we fell in love.
Sarah kept her pen moving, and by July 2019, Sarah had sent us close to 65 poems. We were thrilled with every gorgeous piece she sent over, and we wanted to honor the original connections Sarah discovered during the writing process: femininity, spirituality, and natural beauty.
"Lady of the Roses is blooming with your help"
While Sarah sat with the edits, critique, and proofreading, we started developing cover concepts that would match her aesthetic: a blend of earthy and ethereal.
Mystical, Earthy Collection
Memory, image, and an ecstatic union with the earth raise important questions about the nature of life and of the divine in Sarah’s work. Lady of the Roses was born from the earth from which the poet hails, the great and powerful desert, and we wanted to honor and mirror the movement of the earth in her work. So we found a way to arrange and order the poems as a collection and on each page that would allow content and form to speak to each other.
“Raga
Little bird
becomes big
and loud
in devotion.”
From Lady of the Roses.
Then we finalized the cover, wrote the blurb, found excited poets to review the collection, put it on the platform (whew), did a final round of proofreading, mailed it out to her, anddddddd Sarah finally got to hold, share, and celebrate her collection with her friends, family, and a whole bunch of other people (see her amazing reviews on Amazon . . .).
Lady of the Roses is excavated from the landscapes of life. We find waves of water on which once-distant goddesses rise to meet us. Here, a mysterious lady arrives on the scent of roses, opening to us her cloak of stars. In this debut collection, we find memory, music, and the miraculous desert. We find "what is pulsing / holy and pure."