Allisa Cherry

An Exodus
of Sparks

praise for An Exodus of Sparks

"Allisa Cherry's poems are more than sparks. They are flames. In this incredible collection, we are guided through a world of family, nature, love, and faith. It is not easy. The world is a violent place. But within Cherry's deft lyric-narratives, we find we are not alone. This book is equal parts power, vulnerability, ecstaticism, and measure." Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry: Poems

“Cherry’s riveting poems are lifted by stunning paradoxes and striking juxtapositions: the biblical and the contemporary, the textual and the lived moment, the mystery of the body’s desires and Sunday school lectures on chastity. So too, remarkably, An Exodus of Sparks balances lyrical grace and gritty, heartbreaking tenderness, and shocking familial violence. Cherry chronicles the disorienting aftermath that follows the loss of a father, a brother, and a stranger struck by an SUV. Along the way, this perceptive poet peels back the surface to reveal the buzzing strangeness beneath each quotidian encounter. In one elegantly crafted poem after another, this wonderful book awakens us from our habituation.”
—Yehoshua November, author of The Concealment of Endless Light

"An Exodus of Sparks centers on a people, not as an abstract landmass, but as lives and the loss on which they have been built. They pass through these poems, die, resurrect, share cruelty, and partition love. They inhabit a world where new growth is quickly crushed beneath a bootheel. The collection remains attentive to shimmer while delivering an unflinching indictment of an existence where "the praise of labor / is always answered with more labor." It is an undeniable force, a book of disillusionment with inherited faith, and a homage to constitutive grief."
—Roque Salas Rivera, author of antes que isla es volcan/before island is volcano: poemas

about the author

Allisa Cherry is the author of An Exodus of Sparks (Michigan State University Press) and the winner of the 2024 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. She has been a finalist for Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and The Sewanee Review’s poetry contest. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including Chicago Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Penn Review, EcoTheo, and Salt Hill. Raised in a rural religious community in the irradiated high desert along the eastern border of Arizona, she has since relocated to the Pacific Northwest, where she completed her MFA in Poetry at Pacific University. Allisa works in workforce development, teaching classes for immigrants and refugees transitioning to life in the United States, and serves as an associate poetry editor for West Trade Review.