SB draft Call Me Yes cover.png
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SB draft Call Me Yes cover.png
sarah-browning-head-shot-by-kristin-adair.jpg

Call Me Yes by Sarah Browning

$17.00

Call Me Yes tells the story of the breakdown of a long marriage, the terror and excitement for the middle-aged speaker as she relearns her erotic body, and the tumble into delicious new love. The female body takes center stage – its yearnings, its pain, its sometime violation, and its embrace of joy and pleasure. Along the way, the poems navigate co-parenting a teenager during a difficult divorce, the absurdity of online dating over 50, and living through the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown with a new partner. Browning has lived with chronic pain for decades; short, imagistic poems, all titled “pain,” thread through the collection, emphasizing the non-linear, recurring nature of unresolved physical pain.  


A lifelong activist, Browning brings a socio-political eye to her poems, asserting the liberatory power of the erotic, especially for middle-aged and older women. She also acknowledges her own privilege as a middle-class, mostly hetero white woman and explores the role that shame – one of the powerful tools of white supremacy – played in shaping her early consciousness. As in all of Browning’s works, though, humor plays a major role: the bitter, whimsical, and goofy varieties.

Call Me Yes tells the story of the breakdown of a long marriage, the terror and excitement for the middle-aged speaker as she relearns her erotic body, and the tumble into delicious new love. The female body takes center stage – its yearnings, its pain, its sometime violation, and its embrace of joy and pleasure. Along the way, the poems navigate co-parenting a teenager during a difficult divorce, the absurdity of online dating over 50, and living through the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown with a new partner. Browning has lived with chronic pain for decades; short, imagistic poems, all titled “pain,” thread through the collection, emphasizing the non-linear, recurring nature of unresolved physical pain.  


A lifelong activist, Browning brings a socio-political eye to her poems, asserting the liberatory power of the erotic, especially for middle-aged and older women. She also acknowledges her own privilege as a middle-class, mostly hetero white woman and explores the role that shame – one of the powerful tools of white supremacy – played in shaping her early consciousness. As in all of Browning’s works, though, humor plays a major role: the bitter, whimsical, and goofy varieties.

Sarah Browning is the author of two previous poetry collections, Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works). Co-curator/host of Wild Indigo Poetry, she teaches with Writers in Progress and coaches writers one-on-one. Co-founding director of Split This Rock, Browning received the Lillian E. Smith Writer-in-Service Award and fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, VCCA, Yaddo, Porches, and Mesa Refuge. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Origins, The Delaware Poetry Review, as well as three issues of POETRY magazine. She lives in Philadelphia.

These poems yank desire from the staid lines of rhyme and form, instead enacting pleasure and pain with a rare immediacy. Browning gives us the indispensable authentic voice in a book that’s not afraid to be broken, hungry, and wildly ravenous. In “Tongued,” the tongue writes its own/ constitution right here in our beds. This is a rousing book in which the clitoris speaks, and it says Yes, yes, oh yes! And you will too, dear reader, as you breathe in these stirring, dazzling poems.

—Jan Beatty, author of Dragstripping (University of Pittsburgh Press)

In work that reads equally as a love letter to both Washington DC and Philadelphia and simultaneously chronicles the jagged heartbreak of divorce and the surprise of new love, in Call Me Yes, Sarah Browning covers life’s ever-changing landscape with poems that sing to the body and make a boldface call to pleasure.

—Teri Ellen Cross Davis, author of a more perfect Union (The Ohio State University Press)