Introducing Sarah Axelrod Featured Writer
When I first encountered the work of Sarah Teal Axelrod, I felt the unmistakable pull of a writer who sees with rare clarity. Her brilliant mind makes stunning collages of experience — “the smell of my grandparents’ house in New Haven… a glass of cold Ovaltine,” “trees like the lines of pens scratching out a secret” — images and sensations toing and froing, combining to move and grip us, compelling us to think critically about what it means to be human. She writes her adolescence exactly as she lived it: dangerous, unprotected, and bewildering. “Machine guns slid under the seats in front of us” in a black SUV; “two glossy bodies moving” in a mansion room; the fluorescent hum of a mall food court vibrating with “greasy cheese making me sweat.” She leads us through these volatile, disorienting moments with a clarity that never sensationalises, and through raw, unflinching honesty, manages to reassure us that we will be okay.
Sarah’s art curates memory into meaning. A dollhouse becomes a place where an adult child peers back through the windows of her own past — “heads of little dolls… shoes blood red… furniture glued in place.” Transformation is found in story and spirit: “I am Dorothy… the legs of my past shrivel and curl away into black grass.” Even her smallest pieces carry a stripped‑back emotional force, as in the quiet revelation of “Sunlight—an elusive God, hidden except inside a velvet heart.”
Across poetry, memoir, drama, and visual work, she helps us understand the subtle complexities that shape a life — the Gods and Monsters of inheritance, adolescence, longing, motherhood, and the ways memory reshapes itself around what we survive. Whether she is tracing the aftershocks of love, the ache of early womanhood, or the quiet devastations a family carries, she writes from the hidden depths of the soul.
To read her is to be guided by a writer who does not flinch from the difficult or the beautiful. She helps us navigate scenes, people, and places through vivid descriptions — crumbs on the path that lead us through the dark, enchanted forests of life. Magic and meaning are found in a taquito at Bennigan’s, a Sprite in a fridge‑lit kitchen, a child’s braid, a riverbank, a bed at dawn, and in memories that reveal something essential about being human, each one offering its own insight.
You can read Sarah on Substack https://substack.com/@beyondbeinggood
on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/beyondbeinggoodpoetry/
and Threads https://www.threads.com/@beyondbeinggoodpoetry
More from Sarah Teal Axelrod
Explore all six pieces → /tag/sarah-teal-axelrod/