If I Hold My Breath, by Esther Sadoff

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features. “One of the hardest things about depression is trying to convey that experience to another person. However, Esther Sadoff’s poems capture the mix of sadness and numbness in insightful and heartbreaking ways. If I Hold My Breath seems to take place in an interminable winter where the speaker is asked “to feel nothing, to bear everything.” But the ability to name the pain makes these songs of survival; the speaker keeps “falling down,” but “can’t stop getting up.” Sadoff’s poetry is dark, but also vivid and alive, in other words, real. There isn’t a dishonest word in this book, and anyone who has ever felt lost will be moved by these poems.” —Justin Lacour, Editor, Trampoline Poetry This collection consists of poems of quiet strength and solitude, set against a snowy backdrop. The poems ask us to reflect on desire, relationships, individuality, aging, and time. Threaded within the collection are poems about writing and language: “Saying it makes it so but writing it makes it doubly so.” Writing is a source of solace and authors are a survival line. These poems of contradiction and introspection will leave the reader with more questions than answers, as poems dance between the past, present, and future. More and more of who we are will be lost. Small sacrifices accumulate within a landscape set on burying us. But in the end, the speaker taunts fate, and keeps picking herself back up: “I know you’ve always hated that about me — how I keep falling down, how I can’t stop getting up.” In this collection, winter leaves its indelible mark: “I knew the snow would never die.” Told with raw urgency and vulnerability, these poems will leave you breathless. Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hole in the Head Review, Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Red Ogre Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She is the author of several forthcoming chapbooks: Some Wild Woman, Finishing Line Press; Serendipity in France, Finishing Line Press; and Dear Silence, Kelsay Books. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2023 by Hole in the Head Review.