Sara Adams is a poet and teacher whose work uses found text, erasure, mistranslation, constraint, humor, and linguistic play to remake everyday language. She studied language, writing, and education at the University of Redlands and has published experimental poetry in journals including DIAGRAM, Permafrost, Queen Mob’s Tea House, and One Sentence Poems.
Her chapbooks include Western Diseases, Poems for Ivan, We All Have to Keep Our Heads, and Think Like a B. Her found-poetry practice has used newspapers, novels, erasure, and constraint as source material.
Sara Adams in Shampoo
Shampoo published Adams in Issues 26 and 41. Issue 26 presents a visually oriented contribution preserved in the original archive. Issue 41 publishes the paired poems Picnic and Piknik, in which a familiar social scene is repeated through altered grammar and vocabulary.
These appearances place Adams within Shampoo’s archive of contemporary poets and connect her work with a wider field of experimental poetry shaped by found language, procedural writing, and linguistic transformation.
Picnic and Piknik
Picnic begins with an uneven exchange: one person brings basket, blanket, utensils, drink, and food while the other brings appetite. Piknik restages the scene through transformed syntax. Familiar actions remain legible while grammar tilts the social relation into a stranger register.
The pairing turns error into composition. Articles, verb forms, and substitutions change the emotional pressure of the scene while preserving enough structure for the two poems to remain visibly linked.
Found poetry and constraint
Adams has repeatedly worked with found language. A 2014 profile documents her participation in a month-long project that required poets to make daily poems from newspaper text under changing constraints. Later publications include erasures and other forms built from pre-existing language.
This practice places her within contemporary American poetry that treats source text, procedure, and transformation as active compositional materials.
Further reading
Poets & Writers records Adams’s chapbooks and experimental publications. Permafrost documents her work and connection to Shampoo.