Dear Sal, second edition

By Jeremy Radin

Inspired by Lanford Wilson’s play Talley’s Folly, Jeremy Radin’s Dear Sal is a series of epistolary meditations on loneliness, longing, the Jewish diaspora, bewilderment, divinity, and love. Radin’s second collection lays bare a life lived in romantic exile, using the play’s events—one year after a brief but passionate affair, a man returns to a deserted boathouse on his beloved’s family property in order to offer himself to her—as the foundation for a mystifying interior stage, populated by a cast of eccentrics, upon which a man must wrestle, each moment, with his own unremitting desire.

“Dear Sal is a thick braid of joy, despair, Judaica, dragon teeth, familial history, & desire.”
— sam sax, author of Madness