excerpt:
Sarah Arvio's Cry Back My Sea is a performance in the language of heartbreak and longing. In these poems Arvio, a translator of Federico Garcia Lorca, boasts his influence: simple language, first person, confessional. But what she does next is where her own mastery becomes evident. Using nothing but words, Arvio send out ripples of sounds and connotations that build up and pare down meaning into waves of sense and sensation…. The swelling of words crests, and the foam left on the surface sounds like a foreign language that, as it turns out, you understand fluently….
What fascinates me most, though, is the undertow, which gives this playful and poignant volume its strongest overall cohesion. This backward-looking impulse is a search for the unspoken…. These poems are a tour through the semantics of someone else's mind, masterfully crafted by the poet to require just enough translation to conjure not just the satisfaction of surprise, but the intimacy of discovery that goes along with love and heartbreak.