Sara Wainscott's The Star Cabins is a profound exploration of the self's melt through language acquisition, pattern, and loss. The speaker of this expansive long poem morphs between selves: writer, mother, reader, daughter, drifter, lover, and witness while questioning the limits and obligations of each. "Too long alone an I becomes a you / Positioned on a high dive," Wainscott writes in the book's pressurized couplets that balance a tender vulnerability alongside wolfish, piercing ferocity. The Star Cabins is a sonically brilliant and formally daring inquiry into death and what it means to accompany the dying, to endure absence, and to recognize "A good life that's slow / And over at the right time // Belongs not even to the clouds."

Sara Wainscott is the author of Insecurity System (Persea, 2020) and The Star Cabins (Rescue Press, 2026). She lives in Chicago.

"Since I first read The Star Cabins, it's been knocking around my head. 'Time is the beauty / People attribute to the natural world,' Sara Wainscott writes. I think this musical book will keep knocking around my head for all time, or at least for as long as I have a head. Wainscott drops her 'I' through this book like a lost airpod bouncing loose around the floor of the world: 'A stranger eyes me while he sings // Ain't no sunshine when she's gone and / Inside that moment I stay sometimes.' She found a new way to sing, and if you like music—even if you don't think you like poetry—you will love this book. You will love the way it sings." — LUCY BIEDERMAN

"Reading The Star Cabins is like watching life flash before your eyes, except instead of your own life, signaling your death, it is Sara Wainscott's life, and it makes you feel alive." — JESSCIA LASER

"Early in The Star Cabins, we realize: 'You and I are // Constrained by being / Alive.' Such are the astonishing paradoxes in Sara Wainscott's alchemical book-length poem. Written largely in unpunctuated couplets and loose meter, The Star Cabins stellifies the ordinary, suspending time in an act of simultaneity. The result is a singular work both weary and funny, jumbled yet precise, spare but overbrimming. If F. Scott Fitzgerald was right—that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to function while holding two opposing ideas in the mind—then Wainscott is a genius." — James Shea