“I thought that being inside would protect me, with its corners and its curtains, then a kindness took me by the throat and stretched me taut against the sky, beaming, and I found something more valuable than protection. If only you could have seen it, Mother. What light.”
Two women set out through the haze of social and environmental collapse in search of fertile soil. As they travel through deserts, burned-over forests, and lightless mountain caverns, they learn to navigate the terrain of their evolving connection. An invocation, an elegy, a postcard home, Sift is a story about family wounds, humanity’s failures, how to care for one another at the end, and how to make a new beginning.
Praise for SIFT
Written in tiny bites, like the sips of air encouraged by The Driver in the story, Sift takes us into the worlds we create within ourselves when the outside world becomes untenable. Borrowing from the scientific terms for plant and animal life, we are (re)introduced to ourselves on the granular level, prompting us to ask questions like ‘what does it mean to be human?’ ‘What is a friend,’ and ‘do I exist even if my body has been left behind?’ This small volume engages in the same search for truth as Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest, and packs a wallop.
—Kathleen Alcalá, author of Spirits of the Ordinary and The Flower in the Skull
Alissa Hattman’s Sift is an extraordinarily palpable rendition of how love and grief might be reshaped by our still-unfolding climate crisis. If there is great loss here, there is also great beauty: in the natural world, in the language that evokes it, and in the better relationships we might choose with the nonhuman and with each other.
—Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
Descended from Octavia Butler's parables, Sift is a beautiful, pastoral novel for our time about how to care for another, for others, when the end comes, when it is coming. A book that is also a vision.
—Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy and A Horse at Night
Today we are lucky to hold a book by Alissa Hattman, whose attentions to time, gradient, and tremor have always been realized through the knowledge that a world with these abilities must also hold beauty and truth. These edges, Tortula now explains repeatedly and truly, are how we learn to wonder, to trust, and crucially, to repair.
— Mairead Case, author of Tiny
Alissa Hattman writes with intention and care. Every line is its own poem. Every moment creates space, sensation, emotion. Inviting and moving inside the challenges of apocalypse, Sift is tangled in love and identity and the bigness of the world in its most intimate places. A deep and incredibly beautiful book.
—Raki Kopernik, author of The Things You Left and The Memory House
Guided by a driver full of snails and river water and half-memories, Alissa Hattman's SIFT reminds us that to exist is to journey through a world until only our horizon remains. To read Hattman is to put language through a sieve, and study its glimmering remains. If you look closely enough what reflects back might be your own face. A gorgeous debut about listening to the distant sounds of a world falling away, and how its echoes might spell hope.
—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily
A lush and lyrical vision of growth amid environmental catastrophe, Alissa Hattman's novel, Sift, shows us how to grieve the past while nurturing new human connections and shared, regenerative landscapes.
—Thea Prieto, author of From the Caves
Alissa Hattman’s Sift is gorgeous, fierce, and wise. In this dystopian, woman-centric landscape, the boundaries between internal and external reality are shimmeringly porous, and heartbreak and magic are intertwined. Hattman is a profoundly gifted stylist who never loses sight of the novel’s deep emotional center.
—Dawn Raffel, author of Boundless as the Sky
Alissa Hattman’s haunting debut novel takes place in a world so damaged that humans can barely survive in it — the world, in other words, that may await us all. Sift is a fractured, feverish, beautiful song of mourning and of care, its questions urgent, its melodies complex.
—Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
Press
Interview with Laura Paul for Writing the Rapids Podcast, March 2024
Interview with Tai Woodville for Pine Grove Literary Review, December 2023
Interview with Siloh Radovsky for the Experimental Practice podcast, November 2023
Sift reviewed by Nathaniel Drenner in Independent Book Review, November 2023
Sift reviewed by Sarah Boon in The Millions, October 2023
Interview with Lucie Bonvalet in Moss, October 2023
Interview with Mairead Case in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, September 2023
Sift playlist in Largehearted Boy, September 2023
Interview with Jaqueline Alnes in Electric Literature, September 2023
Interview with Neeraja Srinivasan in Platform Magazine, September 2023
Sift reviewed by Tom DeBeauchamp in Full Stop, July 2023
“Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2023, Part 2” Debutiful, June 2023
Sift reviewed by Hannah Pass in The Rumpus, May 2023
Sift cover reveal in Lit Hub, May 2023