"Some of the Children Were Listening, is a haunting investigation of what it means to both leave and become. This is a landscape of girls and seasons (from the summer 'we took off our sundresses & touched our tongues / to the thorax of June bugs' to the heart of a winter when 'dawn drags a knife across the belly of the sky') and how both are bound to change. Sanderson creates and inverts a lush world of moons and rain, lilies and hyacinths, cicadas and locusts, children and men. Through sensual, precise, and startling language, the characters in these poems linger in nostalgic reverence and plot their necessary escapes. Yes, some of the children were listening, will you?"
--Caitlin Scarano, author of Do Not Bring Him Water

"In her first book Lauren Sanderson creates landscapes--mythic and psychological--with deep images that evoke the early work of Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin. Her poems open into surprises and shocks with a vision of the gendered world where violence and love illuminate the human struggle and the primordial and the contemporary merge. An impressive debut."
--Peter Balakian, author of Ozone Journal

"Sanderson is a seer with an eye trained for the intimate and the arcane. It seems she can see it all, especially those invisible things that lift and crush each of us. Here is a telling of mothers and daughters and all the life and death between them. A heart-splitting, stunning debut."
--Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black

"As its title suggests, Lauren Sanderson's Some of the Children Were Listening is both intimate and impressionistic. Textures of gendered violence come through like an argument behind a closed door--no less visceral for their subtlety, their sometimes-warped language. Here, old losses and fresh questions haunt the landscape, where the boundlessness of grief pushes against the walls of Sanderson's tightly-bound stanzas. Far from claustrophobic, these little rooms make for a rich, expansive interiority, one that not only mourns but also imagines, celebrates, and continuously surprises."
--Franny Choi, author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone and Soft Science