Meet Sabrina.
I make things because I like being alive.
I am a poet, pianist, composer, and visual artist working across words, sound, collage, and whatever else happens to hold my attention.
I have a compulsion to create.
My work tends to begin with small things. A sentence overheard. Funny shaped rocks. An old magazine. A strange combination of colors. A few notes repeated at the piano. The ordinary material of being here. I am interested in what happens when we pay attention long enough.
I don't experience poetry, music, and visual art as entirely separate practices.
They are different ways of doing the same thing: paying attention.
A haiku places a few images beside one another.
A photomontage places fragments beside one another.
A composition places sounds beside silence.
Meaning happens somewhere in between.
Outside of art, I study mathematics and astrophysics, practice haikai, run very long distances through the mountains, and spend a great deal of my life wondering about time, consciousness, beauty, and what any of us are doing here. When not outdoors, I can often be found discussing physics, philosophy, and human behavior with my husband, and chasing after our two wild sons.
— Sabrina Rae Valentine
My first poetry collection, Mundane Devotions, grew from my practice of haiku and my fascination with the ordinary.
The poems are an exercise in noticing rather than explaining.
I am drawn to brevity because it leaves room. A small poem can hold something enormous without naming it. Much of my writing circles presence, impermanence, tenderness, humor, and the peculiar experience of being a human among animals, objects, weather, and stars.
Mundane Devotions is my first published collection.
Poetry
The world disappears when I play piano.
I have been composing music for more than two decades. It is my attempt to translate experience into sound. Most of my pieces are written about something specific. I want to know what things sound like when they are freed from language. What does longing sound like? A childhood memory? A landscape? Love? Grief? A person you can't quite explain?
Sometimes I can spend pages trying to say something that the piano understands immediately.
My debut album, Wild Child, will be released in December 2026. The name comes from something friends have called me throughout my life, and the album itself is deeply personal containing pieces I composed when I first sat at the piano bench.
In that sense, Wild Child is more than my first album. It is a musical record of the person I have been becoming for more than twenty years: the things I have loved, noticed, lost, imagined, and carried with me translated into sound.
Music
My visual work often begins with destruction.
I cut apart books, magazines, photographs, advertisements, bodies, landscapes, colors, and objects and put them together somewhere they were never intended to belong.
I love photomontage because it changes meaning through proximity. An ordinary image becomes strange when it is removed from its original context. Two unrelated things can suddenly seem as though they have been waiting for each other all along.
Unlike the infinite possibilities of a blank page, collage begins with what already exists.
The work becomes an act of noticing, selecting, and reimagining.