{"id":95938,"date":"2025-08-31T09:07:52","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T16:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=95938"},"modified":"2025-09-05T09:26:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T16:26:06","slug":"sarah-mays-poetry-honors-the-great-salt-lake-as-body-and-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/sarah-mays-poetry-honors-the-great-salt-lake-as-body-and-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah May\u2019s Poetry Honors the Great Salt Lake as Body and Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/div>\n

Our stories are our bodies. Our bodies are our legacy\u2026<\/em><\/h4>\n

So writes Sarah May<\/a>, a local artist and community organizer known for her multimedia collaborations with Great Salt Lake. May is a master of ecosystem-assemblages. In the backseat of her car you will usually find a box of bird feathers and driftwood. In her pockets are seeds and tiny bones collected during her wanderings on the lakeshore. These pieces find their way into her cyanotypes, weavings, and now, her poems. As I read Sarah May\u2019s poetry, I hear the resonances of her unique artistic practice:<\/h4>\n

Gathering the bones<\/em>
\nfrom your salt and sand<\/em>
\nI fall asleep holding them to my chest\u2026<\/em><\/h4>\n

I hear the resonances of her activist practice, too. Since 2022, May has played a central role in the Vigil for Great Salt Lake. As a founding member of the Making Waves Artist Collaborative<\/a>, she hosted community art builds in her garage and traveled around the valley to create cyanotype waves in collaboration with the Lake\u2019s tributaries: the Bear River, Jordan River, and Weber River. Every year, vigil-keepers carry these fabric waves around the Utah state capitol in a slow procession. The collection of waves is a physical representation of our entire watershed\u2014the lifeline of our ecosystem.<\/h4>\n

Our bodies do not exist for their fragile agendas \/ we are the fault lines in their foundation \/<\/em>together we are the sea \/ crashing our waves\u2026<\/em><\/h4>\n

If you overhear Sarah May talking about Great Salt Lake, you might assume she\u2019s talking about a beloved friend, a neighbor, or even a crush. As a young queer person who was raised in the LDS church, May felt like the Lake was one of the only places where she could go to really be herself. May\u2019s mother is from El Salvador; she fled political violence and came to the U.S. as a refugee before May was born. Growing up in Salt Lake City, May felt like she was often trapped between unwelcoming worlds. \u201cThe Lake really held me during that time,\u201d she says. \u201cNow it\u2019s our turn to hold her.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Reading the poems aloud, they reverberate with a hypnotic and cinematic rhythm. Between beautiful montages of salt crystals and tundra swans in flight, there rises an immensely unsettled energy, a screaming that points to the claustrophobia of growing up in a state that has continuously attacked the rights of queer people, in a valley where toxic dust poisons Latinx communities, in a city that murdered its namesake.<\/h4>\n

Grief gathers<\/em>
\ninto great black matter<\/em>
\nstuck in my throat\u2026<\/em><\/h4>\n

May\u2019s poems trace the contours of a profound relationship, one that has nurtured her since childhood. Each section of the book is named after a stage in the life of a bird embryo. From \u201cegg tooth\u201d to \u201chead under wing,\u201d we witness the slick unfolding and slow feathering of a being waiting to be born. Local readers will sense the prescience of these symbols. Just this summer, reporters revealed<\/a> that Kennecott\u2019s tailing ponds are poisoning the Lake with selenium, a metal that is toxic to birds and halts the development of their embryos.<\/h4>\n

I am frightened to continue this walk along your exposed bed \/ afraid I will find my own remains among the bodies of seagulls and grebes\u2026<\/em><\/h4>\n

Our stories are our bodies<\/em> arrives at a time of dangerously low water levels. Toxic dust sweeps across the valley and engulfs west-side preschools. The dust puts people at higher risk for cancers, asthma, neurodegenerative diseases and birth defects. Latinx and Pacific Islander neighborhoods are disproportionately exposed. Young children experience the worst harm because toxins have less space to diffuse in their systems. As May writes, “Our bodies are our legacy. What stories are they telling us, now?”<\/h4>\n

Sarah May\u2019s poetry reads like a crystal-clear day in between weeks of inversion, a stunning reminder that this place was, and is, sacred. Her poetry and artwork alike remind me what it means to deeply honor the more-than-human world.<\/h4>\n

Read more about Sarah May and order an autographed copy of\u00a0 here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our stories are our bodies. Our bodies are our legacy\u2026 So writes Sarah May, a local artist and community organizer known for her multimedia collaborations with Great Salt Lake. May is a master of ecosystem-assemblages. In the backseat of her car you will usually find a box of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1737,"featured_media":95959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[2893],"class_list":["post-95938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-sarah-may"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/sarah-may.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-26 20:59:45","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95938"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96052,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95938\/revisions\/96052"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}