89% - Sarah Cooper

89% narrates the love story of a mother and daughter: one has cancer while the other grapples with her sexuality. This collection documents the mother, using her words as quotes, floating between poems. The daughter explores her body as she witnesses her mother and experiences the bodies of other women. While sexuality and disability are central to the formulation of this collection, these poems resist single-issue narratives. There is humor and light alongside enduring loss. This collection asks its audience to sit in the lines of its poems as we listen to the mother and hear the voice of the daughter. 89% won the poetry prize for the Clemson-Converse Literature Series.