You're My Favorite

 "You’re My Favorite, Lauren Saxon’s stunning debut, ripples with heartache, joy and tenderness, revealing how intertwined these emotions are, and how inseparable we are from one another. With exquisite attention to detail and gorgeous tonal pivots, Saxon crafts a voice spacious enough to hold grief and longing, knowing that this is what it means to live well; to love fiercely and recklessly in the shadow of loss: “Because when grief placed us in each/ other’s arms, we chose to dance.” Saxon is a poet who reminds me to keep delight and wonder close as I attempt to say the unsayable, and who echoes Ross Gay’s words in The Book of Delights: “Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?” Whether praising the simple choreographies of intimacy or grieving the absence left in its wake, Saxon manages to stretch each gesture into the universal, celebrating how we make a home out of what we love."

                           - Kendra DeColo, author of I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World

 "In her debut collection, You're My Favorite, Lauren Saxon clarifies the convention that we are to choose between honesty and beauty. In fact, there is enough room for both and both fully. When Saxon writes, 'One explains how pain is good for a poet. In this way, perhaps you are good for me', she reminds us of the truly daring exercise of appraisal - how captivated the mind and heart can become by the familiar yet demanding task of living. Spanning the themes of race, memory, and relationship, these poems are a telling trove of generous forethought, an outstretched arm reaching toward the buoyed endeavor of love made precious by its proximity to the lurking chance of loss. What a tremendous gift this is." 

                                                  - Olatunde Osinaike, author of Speech Therapy and The New Knew 

 Lauren Saxon’s poetry asks us to consider how “life is still possible in the deepest of / trenches.” Saxon’s poems do not look away from grief but stare it down in ways that reveal its power and its failure to fully consume. In Your My Favorite, Saxon transforms everyday objects and spaces—flowers, hospitals, classrooms—into mirrors that reflect our capacity for love and vulnerability to loss. Yet, the heart of this book is not defeat. Rather, we see a purposeful, relentless (re)construction of family, relationships, and love of all kinds. These fragments of people create an ode to a new self, one who can “write poems / well enough to make people feel seen.” 

                                                                                                 - Charnell Peters, author of Un-becoming