"No one since John Haines' Winter News has written so well about the interminable winters, the snow, the cold, and the human solitude of those living in polar regions. These are the dark night of the soul of poems beautifully written, supremely intelligent and consistently rewarding. Kelsea Habecker's poems remind us that the outer and inner landscapes are connected and that the way we think about the world depends on the amount of light and darkness we are given each day. Hollow Out is one of the most moving and original books of poems I have read in years."
-Charles Simic, Poet Laureate of the United States, author of My Noiseless Entourage
"The lyric voice in Kelsea Habecker's Hollow Out is almost hypnotically lovely. Her poems are so cleanly written! They are also grave, soulful, and infinitely tender. Other hallmarks include their passionate restraint, beacon-like humility, great delicacy of expression, and spirit of endurance--this last despite the arctic darkness many of them so beautifully reveal, but never succumb to."
-Amy Gerstler, author of Ghost Girl and Bitter Angel
"Hollow Out is full of precision, of climate adding its persona to thinking and feeling, the marvelous results of the natural, inner-versus-outer struggles we take for granted the moment we forget that we are bodies and that our bodies are the property of language, surrender, and earth. The style within Habecker's craft accomplishes "a temporary stay" so that the poems never feel over poeticized, or forced into stanzas-with-training wheels. When things happen, they happen because the lyric impulse has interrupted experience, not because the work must serve metaphor or force the reader into literary understanding. These poems are full of creative integrity: minimal, structural, purposely accidental, and the fluidity of the vertebrated body behaving like the tongued mouth casting a compassed spell."
-Thomas Sayers Ellis, author of The Maverick Room and The Good Junk (Take Three #1)
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
