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: “Toytown” by Grace Cavalieri
The name Other Voices, Other Lives, is not purely poetical, in fact, for Grace Cavalieri it is a mission statement. In her Legacy Book of the same name there are several sections in 3rd person omnipotent which aim to breathe the same air as famous women who have suffered adversity. Tragic figure Anna Nicole Smith, feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Cora from William Carlos William’s Kora in Hell. All in all they are an admix of Grace Cavalieri’s poetic life, all brought together in one beautiful volume; so, perhaps, we might figure that Anna Nicole Smith converses with Mary Wollstonecraft for the very first time in the pages of Other Voices, Other Lives.
Today, from the Anna section we have the heart-rending “Toytown”
Talking Jazz and Rock with Poet Reuben Jackson (Laura Ritchie)
Author and music educator Lauren Ritchie sat down with ASP’s Reuben Jackson this week to talk jazz with the man himself. Reuben’s music credentials are long and impressive, from curating the Duke Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian to hosting a weekly Jazz radio show for NPR Vermont, to his poetry which takes inspiration from and frequently comments on the American Jazz idiom. Listen to or read the interview…
Rose Solari talks with Acclaimed Poet David Gewanter
This Sunday, October 21, at 8 p.m., ASP’s Rose Solari is reading with acclaimed poet, essayist, editor, and professor David Gewanter in a new poetry reading series at Second Story Books, 2000 P Street NW, Washington DC. In preparation for their reading, Rose talked with David about his work, particularly his most recent collection, Fort Necessity. Here is a part of their discussion…