Lit Pub Raves about Hazen's Girls Like Us in New Review
Hazen's opus gets a well-deserved lauding from rising literary star Nandini Bhattacharya.
October 2020 was a tough time to release a book. In fact, next to August 1929 and February 2007, October 2020 might have been the worst time to release a book in modern history. Fortunately for Elizabeth Hazen, Girls Like Us has seemed to find staying power in the minds of critics.
Nandini Bhattacharya's new review of the collection sheds special light on the skill and empathy of Baltimore's Hazen, specifically as it pertains to the latent traumas of girlhood in the industrialized world. She writes, "If the legacy of a timeless cri-de-coeur out of the depths by women writers has seemed to become redundant in the last twenty-odd years of post-feminism, then Elizabeth Hazen’s poetry collection titled Girls Like Us is the aesthetic equivalent of pushing the finger back into the unhealed wound: the trauma of girlhood and womanhood in this society as in most others."
In pondering Hazen's use of the natural world and natural sciences in her poetry, Bhattacharya compares Hazen to the "seventeenth-century metaphysical poets who astonished the old world with unimagined similitudes and verisimilitudes plucked out of an unfolding natural world and Natural Philosophy aka Science."
The review ends with an expectation by Bhattacharya that, "Readers of Elizabeth Hazen can expect long years of magic as well as precision-tool craft with words."
Check out the full review here. Buy Hazen's Girls Like Us here*. Read more from Bhattacharya here.
*Girls Like Us is half price through Sunday 6/14 and US shipping is free
Rose Solari Joins in a Dickinson Tradition at this Year’s Tell it Slant Festival
While the Emily Dickinson poetry marathon is not a marathon in the traditional sense, it does test the endurance, fortitude, and preparedness of all its participants. Over a seven day period, 14 hours in all, participants will read every one of the enigmatic 19th-century poet’s 1,789 poems in the order prescribed by R.W. Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson.
A Stirring Tribute: Carmen Nickerson reads Solari’s “Meditation for my Country” During 9/11 Concert
Accomplished singer-songwriter Carmen Nickerson and pianist Kostia Efimov provide an intimate, acoustic set as part of the No Studios unplugged series.
At approximately 42 minutes into the set, Nickerson pauses to acknowledge the date – September 11th – and pulls out a sheet of paper. The poem she reads is Rose Solar’s “Meditation for my Country.”
Grace Cavalieri Releases New Podcast with Jeffrey Lamar Coleman
Grace Cavalieri’s new podcast is off to a strong start. This week’s guest is professor Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, editor of “Words of Protest, Words of Freedom: Poetry of the American Civil Rights Movement and Era.”