Nothing Fatal

What happens when love is replaced by romance? In Nothing Fatal, Sarah Perrier explores this and other questions about our contemporary understanding of dating, relationships, sex, and marriage. In the opening lines of "Too Darn Hot," a poem fueled by the same weary ardor as Cole Porter's song, the speaker asks, "Why sort the doubletalk from the innuendo?/They're both lyrical." Rather than sorting the one from the other, the poems of Nothing Fatal delight in the ways that the imperfect and seductive power of language has, for centuries, helped us find new and inventive ways to woo one another. Nothing Fatal also acknowledges that while love is itself a creative act, sometimes the things we create can appear to be an unexpected mess, like Frankenstein's monster. Perrier delivers a collection that is at once wise, sly, sexy, and sad. These poems are clearly in favor of love, and yet they also reveal how, through imprecision of language and desire for romantic gestures at once nostalgic and entirely new, we create a kind of comedy from our courting of one another.