Overview

Surrealism, vivid imagery, and spare language draw on tradition to forge a new species of contemporary fairy tale in these poems about love and its demise, family, and identity. Bicher's language is brilliantly spare, and her images are precisely and vividly cut, but pain is the whetstone that hones her lines to their keen, sometimes near-lethal edge....

Full Product Details

9781952335006

Table of Contents

Reviews

... delicate/brittle, tender/brutal, transparent/opaque lyrics all at once. We move ... from a hardened Icelandic terrain and abandoned human heart to Arizona desert and emotional heat. The thermostatic range of these poems is immense. Bicher is a master time shifter bringing us from the mythic to contemporary.... The speakers in the poems are at once unhinged and deeply grounded. These are such complicated (a good word), dynamic, and compelling poems that are wonderfully navigable. A fully realized book, start to finish. --Martha Rhodes Bicher's language is full and ripe in this collection of poems that feel plucked from another time, and melded seamlessly with the present. There is an evanescent, fleeting, fantastical precision in her sword-wielding lines, like 'This is how you break the children-- / This is how you sever the husband-- // with ice and flame' that get you right in the gut. She-Giant in the Land of Here-We-Go-Again is dazzling and earnest, and has a fierce heart at its center. --Bianca Stone ... beautifully mysterious, spare mythologies where 'fathers chop their way into brightness' and mothers 'will eat their own moss.' In the villages and cities of these poems, widows, wives, brothers, mothers, husbands and sons refuse to behave predictably; instead they churn and tumble. Bicher's poems shape an uncanny relationship with Time..., poems that speak with urgency that 'I might not make it back from the future' while acknowledging, 'All over the past we walk without thinking.' This is a mature debut.... --Victoria Redel Surrealism, vivid imagery, and spare language draw on tradition to forge a new species of contemporary fairy tale in these poems about love and its demise, family, and identity. Bicher's language is brilliantly spare, and her images are precisely and vividly cut, but pain is the whetstone that hones her lines to their keen, sometimes near-lethal edge.... innovative uses of form, as in the surprising list in 'How to Get Out of a 20-year Hole' and the series of questions in 'The Woodcutter's Wife.' A remarkable book! --Rebecca Foust

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Countries Available