Sara Martin, Demons on the Hour

Sara Martin takes a seat in the courtyard at the Fine Arts Work Center and turns her face toward the sun. It’s just past 2 p.m. 

“Two p.m. is a demonic time of day,” says Martin, a second-year writing fellow at FAWC. During her first fellowship, in 2018, she wrote a novel in verse called They Wake Up Swinging — it turned out to be “a hard sell,” she says. A 50-page excerpt was published in The Seattle Review in April 2018.

This time around, she’s working on The Mid, a book that meditates on the hour of 2 p.m., which Martin calls “the hole in the day.” Through the hole is “how the demons get in,” she says with authority. The Mid is a narrative in the form of a lyric essay: Martin’s tone is conversational but elusive, her metaphors outrageous, delicate, and transcendent by turns.

A poem about the morning is an aubade. A nighttime poem is a nocturne. But there’s no name for middle-of-the-day poetry, Martin says. “Let’s call them Mids,” she writes on the first page of her book.

Two in the afternoon “is overthinking the thoughts you aren’t having,” Martin writes. “It is the interruption of someone saying life is short while another is saying life is long.”