“This is a rare, evocative, and haunting book. For its sparse song of indwelling in landscapes of austerity; for its understanding of description as a function subordinate to wakefulness of mind, for its process of perception that splits the difference between animal and oblivion, habit and habitat, doubt and debt—I found myself returning again and again to its atmospheric method of knowing; to its structure of restraint and elegance.”
—Roberto Tejada, 2020 series judge and author of Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness

“The metaphysical, sociocultural, and environmental coalesce in these pages, where the small and silent compound in worlds of hunger, interiority, unplacing, wilderness, and withoutness. Worlds as instinctual as the woods calling animals back, and error is both word and action left to those haunted by etymologies, language, and history. I carry Olivares’ book with me as a spell to cast—a spell to prevent the vanishing.”
—Felicia Zamora at Orion Magazine

“Migratory Sound offers a new generation the rarity (in the company of Celan, Juarroz, and Valentine) of a poetry voiced in full presence, low volume. Over and over, Olivares gives form to trusting that intelligence is inseparable from sensoralities. There’s a fearlessness here, humility before the mysteries, and great love.”
—Kathleen Peirce, author of Vault

“If a figure is anything with a physical presence, Sara Lupita Olivares’s poems are a kind of figure study with an audio dimension: what do we see in our seeing, what do we hear (and what do we miss) in our listening? These are poems that undraw the outlines of shape and sound to perceive their astonishing essences.”
—Nancy Eimers, author of Oz

“Few debuts contain the sheer force that Sara Lupita Olivares achieves in Migratory Sound. From beginning to end, I was enthralled with the endless modes of engagement between the self and the landscape that challenge the legacies of the pastoral. The book is neither observation, nor event; neither artifact nor memory, but rather an innovative dialogue that deconstructs the role the landscape has historically played as a source of knowledge, beauty, resource, vision, and enlightenment. I recognize in Migratory Sound a deep respect for the sacredness of language, and Olivares fortuitously bears this burden and responsibility that any great poet assumes, despite the wreckage it might cause. Read this book and allow yourself to experience a lyricism that will haunt you.”
—Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Cenzontle

“I love the wakeful vigilance of these poems, how they teach me to feel and see anew. They arise out of the great silence that surrounds them, hewn from an interior meadow into luminous thought. What it is around them that is not said I cannot say, but the counterbalance there is looming and stunning. In Olivares’s deft hands, I am awakened to many things, as if secretly: the shifting field inside or outside the frame, the absent body language suggests, what is disappearing from view. In this way, these poems are deeply, quietly philosophical and political—an urgent call to attention and to care.”
—Eleni Sikelianos, author of What I Knew