Notes From the Field

Sasha Wade’s Notes From the Field is quiet, pensive, and devastatingly beautiful in the questions it dares to ask about life, loss, and grief. Chosen as the winning spring chapbook from Palette Poetry’s 2025 Micro Chapbook Prize, the poems in Notes From the Field investigate innocence, knowledge, and childlike wonder both oppressed by and also made beautifully succinct through lived experience. Grief and loss are seen through manifestations in nature and wilderness, and the fissures between family are catalogued like perennial flowers slowly rising back up through the winter of memory, into a cusp of spring. Within Wade’s language, winter is at the door and spring is bounding forth, breaking through the hushed echoes of past loved ones in order to see them as “exhibits” upon which she writes her field notes for life.