“Each Knuckle with Sugar”: A Reading & Conversation with Sarah Levine

Join the Wistariahurst Museum for an evening with poet Sarah Levine, whose collection Each Knuckle with Sugar received Poetry Honors in the Massachusetts Book Awards. This program will feature a reading from the collection, followed by a conversation with the poet and an audience Q&A. Attendees are invited to engage with the poems and hear Levine speak about her creative process, influences, and the questions that shape her work.

Each Knuckle with Sugar is a collection in which play becomes power at the turn of a page or a line. Sarah Levine’s endlessly inventive imagery offers readers a charged interiority through language that surprises, delights, and—at times—bares its teeth. The book’s lively wonder is driven by the interplay of grief, love, loss, confusion, and desire, unfolding through an epistolary exchange between two recurring speakers, Herman and Begonia.

This program is sponsored by the Mass Book Awards Speakers Bureau and is presented in collaboration with the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

SARAH LEVINE is the author of Each Knuckle with Sugar, winner of the Driftwood Press Open Reading Contest and a 2025 Massachusetts Book Awards Honors recipient in Poetry. She is also the author of the chapbooks Take Me Home and Her Man, and her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, The Paris American, Passages North, Green Mountains Review, and the Best New Poets anthology, among others. Levine teaches at Williston Northampton School and lives in Western Massachusetts.