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
Featured Poetry: “Winter Funeral” by Elizabeth Hazen
Fully embracing what the lyric mode does best, Hazen provides the readers with brief, intense poems that preserve a suspended moment in time, attempting to record the thought processes and emotions of the speaker much like tree rings reveal drought, heat, and age. With astonishing clarity and concision, Hazen explores the mysteries of our realities—which are ultimately beholden to entropy.
Grace Cavalieri on the Kojo Nnamdi Show Jan 23rd
Recently Governor Larry Hogan announced that Grace Cavlieri, poet, playwright, and long time host of NPR’s The Poet and The Poem, would become Maryland’s next Poet Laureate, succeeding the great Stanley Plumly. Now that she has been inaugurated, one of her first stops is The Kojo Nnamdi show. Kojo Nnamdi has been hosting his show on WAMU for 20 years, so he and Grace are kindred spirits in that regard–Grace has hosted The Poet and The Poem for over 40 years.
A Short Thought on Grace’s Interview with Jorie Graham (by Writer, Nin Andrews)
Nin Andrews is a poet. Most recently of Miss August which is out now from the awesome Cavankerry Press and most notably of the collection, Why God is a Woman. Nin Andrews is also a fan of Grace Cavalieri’s interview with Jorie Graham which she recently extolled over on ITN.