Tributary
Carey Salerno

Tributary tells the heartbreaking story of family fracture–of sisters’ estranged, a brother excommunicated. Arranged as a church service, in tension with the ubiquitous, mythic river that floods their landscape, these fierce and urgent poems seek to expose the struggles and failings of family and faith, the rigidity of conditional love and loyalty. As they do, they mirror our national systemic crises of Islamophobia, sexism, gun violence, fanatical religiosity, and white nationalism. In Tributary, a woman rejects the laws of the “book of truth” that she is raised under in order to discover and claim her own morality.

“Dexterous, relentless, and edifying, these are exploding and gorgeous poems of unapologetic rebellion.”
—Victoria Chang

“The poems in Carey Salerno’s astonishing Tributary move with the same tenacity and elegance as the river that symphonizes the collection.”
—Adrian Matejka

Carey Salerno is a poet and essayist. She is the executive director and executive editor of Alice James Books. Salerno is author of Shelter and co-editor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books. She teaches for the University of Maine at Farmington and resides in New Jersey.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-529-1 / 96 pages / Poetry