Sarah Estes is a poet, essayist and science writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, New Scientist, Christian Science Monitor, Agni, Cimarron, Cider Press Review, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, The Missouri Review, New Orleans Review, Plume, Salon, Slate, Southern Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Hive Bone, was published in 2013 with Finishing Line Press. She was a Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, and has a master's in religion and culture from Harvard. Sarah has taught poetry and composition at UVA and James Madison University, and has received grants and funding from Bread Loaf, UVA and the National Science Foundation. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Books by Sarah Estes:

Other poems on the web by Sarah Estes:
"Pastoral"
"Ardennes"

About Field Work:

"In Field Work Sarah Estes accomplishes that remarkable trick the best poets have mastered: to fully embody and give voice to the notion of life as inconclusive and unsatisfying, and yet, to do so with poetry of doggedly fierce aliveness and beauty. Her physical landscapes — Mississippi's plains, Siberia, Mongolia, and Japan — feed what she describes as her attraction to remoteness, and become canvasses on which she paints elegies of loss, memory, and wisdom. In her world it is normal for winter to 'have it in' for unsuspecting humans, for divorce and romance to share the same precarious neurosis of passion and despair. She writes of self as part of a wide and complex political and social history, and she does it with consummate and efficient craft. 'I awake mastered,' she writes, and yet it is in her 'mastery of the thing' that she stirs us to, if only for a moment, feel satisfyingly alive."
—Kwame Dawes

"I'm drawn to its honesty, and to her ability to ground the poems so firmly in place while retaining a sense of lightness (there's breathing room many of these poems, even as they are simultaneously breathtaking), and especially to her surprising-yet-somehow-inevitable imagery."
—Ruth Foley