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
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Governor Hogan recently announced Maryland’s ninth Poet Laureate to be the incomparable Grace Cavalieri. In his press conference regarding the announcement he touched on her “lifelong” dedication to poetry, and this precisely is one of those defining characteristics of a great artist. ASP celebrated this aspect of Grace in her Legacy Book, Other Voices, Other Lives which is an atemporal sampling of her entire career to now, from poetry to prose, from plays to interviews with US Poets Laureate. It should come as no surprise to Mr. Hogan nor the careful reader of her works then that she has an almost religious dedication and inescapable fascination with her art and its many ingredients. As you we shall hear, in her poem “Work is my Secret Lover,” Poetry is the muse.
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