Lovelike
YPL 2022–23
The eighth collection in the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Series, LOVELIKE is a meditation on all of love’s forms and all the ways love touches our lives: connection, family, lineage, history. This collection was written in partnership with the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate program, a program of Seattle Arts & Lectures.
Praise for LOVELIKE
“LOVELIKE signals a shining new talent. Sah Pham offers deeply felt poems with a captivating voice that conjures the richness and strength won from bonds between daughters and mothers. These poems are a beautiful exploration of connection and resilience—they operate as a guidebook for how to celebrate our most treasured loves.”
—Rena Priest, Washington State Poet Laureate ’21–23
“Sah Pham is a poet of strong and haunting presence. A bright voice both vulnerable and courageous in the search for place, acceptance, and love that’s real. Her words will move you.”
—Kimberly Hill, King County Television station manager
“Sah’s poetry is an inundation of relentless love, convincing even the most heart-bruised and cynical among us to believe in it again and take a good look at the fissures in our own hearts. She helps us see how if you take away the pain, you’re left with an emptier, easier love. But it’s the hard love that is the most meaningful and that you can depend on to see you through the most difficult struggles. This is the kind of poetry that makes you ache; the love in LOVELIKE is holy.”
—Amy Hirayama, WITS Writer, Seattle Arts & Lectures
“Sah Pham’s LOVELIKE is a timely chronology of how love travels through our hearts and souls, capturing all that we share in the world of joy and grief with her poetic voice that speaks for us all.”
—Shawn Wong, author of Homebase and American Knees
“LOVELIKE is a tender, frayed net for us, the shipwrecks: “Let / this be your raft.” As the poems move like tides, Sah Pham carries us through the crevices of a family’s migration, languages spoken and unspoken, and heartbreak. These poems will flow and crash through you, a rejection of the finality of drowning. They are a promise we’ll find love in our ‘shattered parts’ and breathe again.”
—Brian Dang, WITS writer, Seattle Arts & Lectures
“Trying to understand love is like trying to understand the meaning of each breath as we are taking it . . . it’s nearly impossible to conceive of the importance each of those movements has on our being. But Sah Pham attempts to follow those subtleties like a dream she is in the midst of both having and interpreting, and she writes each secret, symbolic message as it whispers to her, I believe, to remind her she is loved.”
—Vicky Edmonds, author of Attempts at Blooming
Sah (also known as Sarah) Pham is the first Vietnamese American Youth Poet Laureate of Seattle. Her poetry has been featured in Seattle’s Child, KUOW 1340 AM radio, and the University of Washington’s The Monologues. She is the founder and former host of Poemcast, a poetry podcast at The Daily. She has served as a Youth Ambassador for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, youth producer with RadioActive Youth Media, and Corbett Scholar at the University of British Columbia. She is an alumna of the University of Washington. LOVELIKE is her first full-length poetry collection.
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