Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

This is the blurb I was honored to write for this chapbook:

"Like Louise Gluck, Newman mythologizes her reality, connecting her experiences to those of women and goddesses from time immemorial. Her imagery is potent, hard and bright, full of metals and minerals, acids and chemicals: “The world digests us into women… / Childhood snaps shut and we are pinned insects.” Deconstructing an abusive relationship, she exerts bardic “revenant eyes” to combine and subvert tropes in novel, alchemical ways: “black birds flew out of my mouth… / But you struck me so hard that I put them all back.” Reaching deep to draw power from the many multi-textured meters of the world’s poetic traditions, stamped in language vibrating with controlled violence, these are poems that speak back to the violence in the world."

Those are two great sample lines from her poetry.

Yeah, I really like those lines! I like the clear simplicity of the syntax, how the "ingredients" of each line are simple, but draw their power from being combined in a way that is fresh and also vivid. They give the sense that the poet has an original vision burning brightly and clearly in her mind, from which her poetry arises.

I'm not sure I'd want to read it any time soon, since I'm plugging through nearly 600 pages of Margaret Atwood's poetry at the moment, but your review is wonderful.