New Review of Girls Like Us: The Collection "Bulges with Debilitating Last Lines"
"The surprise-suplex-onto-concrete, knock-the-air-out-of-you kind of debilitating. Hazen is even dastardly enough to look the reader in the eye, then hook them with the very first last line: 'We’ve been called so many things that we are not, we startle at the sound of our own names.'"
In Lannie Stabile's new review of Elizabeth Hazen's second collection Girls Like Us, she raves about the effect of Hazen's "last lines." Girls Like Us, she says, is "bulging with debilitating last lines." Like this one in the opening poem "Devices," that Stabile points to as like a "hook," “We’ve been called so many things that we are not, we startle at the sound of our own names.”
Stabile's review appears in The Poetry Question which seeks to lift the voices of small press poetry. Stabile is the Managing Editor at Barren Magazine and is a member of the MMPR Collective.
Girls Like Us is Hazen's second collection of poems after Chaos Theories (2016).
The World of Yesterday (Armistice Day, 2018)
My father always said that his first memory was of standing on the couch in his parent’s living room, small hands on the back cushion, peering out a picture widow at a neighborhood street in Bend, Oregon. There is a slow-moving line of cars and horse-drawn carriages inching its way down the lane. The line of cars is there every day, and every day he stands there and watches. His street is a long one and at the end of it is the cemetery. He is not allowed to go outside to play. Death is all anyone talks about. Death from a great flu epidemic. Death from a great war just ending. Everyone has lost someone. Most have lost a few. It is 1918…
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.