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
Linda Watanabe McFerrin Interviewed for Author Matthew Felix’s Video Podcast
Author and poet Linda Watanabe McFerrin sat down with Matthew Felix, himself an author of some renown, for Matthew’s video podcast this last weekend. What follows is an in-depth, thoughtful, and often irreverent look at writing, life, travel, and zombies. And more, we get to hear many of the juicy details on Linda’s new Legacy Book due out from ASP in Autumn 2019…
Fact or Fiction
…And so it is for me, as I send an invented “namesake” into worlds I know vicariously but haven’t lived—Hollywood and hippies, communes and con artists, Woodstock and the Summer of Love. In the opening of Melanie’s Song, J.J. is poised at the edge of the Pacific reflecting on where she has been and where she is going. She is endowed with a deep and spiritual connection to a native place we share, but I am also setting her free to fly into her own undiscovered territory.
Featured Poetry: “Bluebirds” by Grace Cavalieri
Other Voices, Other Lives was my introduction to Grace. Her book sits now on my shelf between The Waves and Duino Elegies, the pages are worn from thumbing-thru, it is dog-eared, destroyed in certain ways well-loved books are destroyed, aged by the eyes, like good denim, but here the creases are black underlines, and the fading is from yellow highlighter and coffee stains. So in honor of, well, my deep admiration for Grace, I’ve picked one of her poems from Other Voices, Other Lives to share. If this is the first encounter with her poetry, welcome, hello, the books page is just yonder up the screen under “books”! If you’ve long been a fan, I think “Bluebirds” is a great poem to share with those who might not yet have been introduced to Grace’s work.