Sparrow on the Rooftop

Rachel Long’s vivid new collection is a study of toxic love, crisis and recovery, at once moving and whip-smart, from one of our brightest stars in poetry.

'At first you eat less because you’re happy, / so fricking happy, the way you are in high summer / when you just can’t because of the sun.'

Sparrow on the Rooftop tells a story of new love: the summer-like giddiness of it, the ferocity of obsession, and the stark hollowing of absence. Alongside this affair, and unleashed by its intensity, unfolds another story, half-buried, about our young narrator’s uneasy relationship with her body: ‘Black girls// don’t get/ eating disorders./ That’s a white girl/ thing.’

Desire, indulgence, denial, and transformation are some of the themes that animate this engrossing, at times frighteningly intimate, narrative collection. With fierce wit and uncommon insight, Sparrow interrogates the self and other, and the experience of self as other. These remarkable, penetrating, headlong poems chart disorder and desire, break-up and breakdown, and the hard path towards recovery, confirming Rachel Long as one of the most gifted poets of her generation.