Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press 2021)
Winner of the 2021 Noemi Press Book Award
Longlist, Tarpulin Sky Book Award 2021
Longlist, Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize
"Slim Confessions is a work of autotheory and an image-text about digital intimacy and visceral material.At its center is a story of farm labor: A cold spring spent birthing sheep in northern Iceland interspersed with confessions about the author’s sexual past. In the lineage of Dodie Bellamy’s “Barf Manifesto,” this is a book reveling in repulsion and attraction, a personal investigation of physical touch as approximated by visual media, a slow pour of parallel stories that chronicle a research trip gone awry."
"Sarah Minor wants to show us what shifts and slithers, what sticks and thwacks (or thwocks). She wants us to think about 'what we can read in slime about ourselves through its tropes and scaffolding.' From work on a sheep farm in iceland helping lambs through the birthing season to a series of scholarly takes on horror films and pornography, from Blobs to 'star jelly' to money shots, Minor takes us on an inquiry into the interactions of our environment and our skin, our pleasures, and our fear. ' I write toward what I'm afraid of' she explains'...or perhaps toward something just past that gore that I have wanted to see all along.' This is a masterly crafted provocation against our aversion to the frighteningly formless."
—Susan Briante, Defacing the Monument
"Minor digs elbow deep into primordial drives of hunger, fear, sex, getting our muck under her nails. Slim Confessions stretches —assimilating an account of birth, analyses of 'the Blob' horror genre cum cumshots, and a dive into adolescent thwocking—without tearing. This is smart, brisk writing, overflowing with potent, pungent sensuousness."
—Douglas Kearney, Buck Studies
"This is a slide covered in slime. It slides from Gak to cum, porn to horror, from books to skin to screens eating the world it seems with the all—mouth that Minor—intensively and with a beaming personal touch—theorizes as slime"
—Caren Beilin, Revenge of the Scapegoat
Bright Archive (Rescue Press 2020)
Winner of the 2020 Big Other Award in Nonfiction
Finalist for CLMP's 2020 Firecracker Award in Nonfiction
Finalist for the 2020 Johnson Award in Nonfiction
One of Entropy's Best Nonfiction Books of 2020-2021
"In Sarah Minor’s adventurous and investigatory debut collection of essays, Bright Archive, place and space are inextricably linked through an imaginative exploration of the patterns, shapes, and systems that alternately organize and disrupt our ordinary intimacies. Using elements of memoir, concrete poetry, archival research, interview, performance, and design in a radiant kaleidoscope of storytelling, the essays in Bright Archive delight in challenging the reader’s habits of interaction with the page and its possibilities."
"Sarah Minor’s sense of what an essay is, what it can look like, and what it can contain is way beyond what almost anyone else is even attempting. Open to any page in this book and you’re going to encounter something new."
—Ander Monson, I Will Take the Answer
"In this thrilling debut, Minor guides us deftly through the underground tunnels of a new age commune, to the branches of a birch tree to build a nest. This collection traverses continents and moves through time, insistent in its curiosity and dazzling in its innovation."
—Mary-Kim Arnold, The Fish & The Dove
"Prose morphing into pearls, rivers down the page, a diagram directs the eye, cupping an essay’s threads. This is a book that, through both story and design, reminds us what wonder feels like."
—Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Borealis
"Minor is a formidable essayist whose contributions to nonfiction are not limited to formal innovation. Bright Archive also interrogates questions of sexuality, refuge, and familial legacy.."
—Zoë Bossiere for The Believer
"A combination of concrete poetry, interviews, memoir, and historical research, Minor's experimental nonfiction collection is interactive architecture with directional force. Each essay demands the reader physically change perspectives to enter figurative and literal interstices that examine how people and places are shaped by one another."
—Tree Abraham for Electric Literature
The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated
Winner of the Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest (2016), selected by Joseph Harrington
Published one via open access through Essay Press.
"A family flees into the taiga and a stump narrates what comes after. This collision of history and myth creates a liminal space between inside and outside, permitted and forbidden, wildness and tameness, content and form, body-text and margin. A mother who easts her children and a mother who won't eat so her children can. If Freud had been a fairytale, he would have asked 'Why is a woman scary?'"
—Joseph Harrington, Things Come On (an amneoir)