3 stars

Free form poems on nature, existence, loss, death, & grief. The poems are full of sound & rhythm, worth reading aloud. I didn’t connect with every poem in the collection, but there were some I really liked, especially “Peony”.

[What I liked:]

•The musings on losing a loved one slowly, as age & illness diminishes them, resonated a lot with me. There is depth in the wrestling with who someone is throughout time, alive & after death, & in the memories of those left behind.

•The rhythm & style of the poems, especially the nature ones, effectively evoke what they describe: the feel of the wind, the sound of crow feathers rustling, the way thoughts can circle & contradict & take shape in your mind.


[What I didn’t like as much:]

•There are several nature focused poems, & several dealing with grief. They’re not an odd pairing, but they’re not tied together very coherently in this collection.

•The poems are very stream of consciousness, with phrasal fragments, not much punctuation, repeated words, etc. The overall effect is nice, I mean the cadences are wonderful, but it often made the content hard to puzzle out.

CW: death & aging are prominent themes

[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]

“A hurl of crows”

I love that phrase from the piece entitled “fretwork” within this rather poignant collection of poetry and prose. An air of reflective sadness, maybe grieving acceptance hangs over many of the works. Indeed the sense of loss and questioning
Like this line from Acceptance,
“What vagueness has overtaken us like a slow-ripening cataract the eyes accept.”
or this from Yellow,
“ it is like having yellow, yellow! with nothing to fix it to.”
or the painful piece Asunder,
“ Missing is not a thing done. Missing should be dwindling! Let missing behave like other gerunds— you could arrest it. But someone is missing as she recedes.”
And then there’s Path of Totality,
“Where does a gaze end when there is nothing to stop it.”
The juxtaposition of words and ideas, the exploration of vision and meaning is rather breathtaking.
An awful (in the positive sense of the word), provocative and evocative compilation to be quietly sipped and appreciated.

A University of Iowa Press ARC via NetGalley
Please note: Quotes taken from an advanced reading copy maybe subject to change
(Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.)

This was a good poetry collection, but it felt kind of disjointed. Many of the poems were okay, but there were a few that I felt really stood out among the rest:

- Limb
- Stranger
- Wilds
- purchased journal, c.1932, red leather
- Wigfitting
- body

Michele Glazer draws on the affordances of poetry to pack image, experience, and memory in well-chosen words. fretwork was a beautiful read and well worth revisiting and sharing.

I have not read Michele Glazer's poetry before, so getting into this short poetry book was a little adventure.

> We’d get into it. After a while, a week, we’d get over it. I’ll be careful next time not to ask she’d say. If some day we would feel stiffened small for resenting her

Poetry is knowledge of heft as it pertains to value. People tend to say 'Poets are the best in treating words the way they ought to be treated', but this is not a golden rule in any sense.

Glazer does care for her words. This book is, to me, about nature and fauna. And repetition, somewhat.

> Stranger what the hagfish. what drags up the hagfish now & how the man says don’t touch the hagfish —but time’s slippery & into the tank of tangled hagfish the keeper reaches—in past the elbow, a shoved-up sleeve blushing with the water wicking up —it’s benign outside. by outside I mean to leave the building with you & enter into a spring day I’m asking you to imagine the rhododendrons, the iris, mock orange in bloom, soft air, & because the danger is not visible time turns to hagfish, jawless & eyeless (where do I go with this?) often I resist directness because direct mis-seizes a thing & stuns it to silence.

It all reminds me of Robert Hass's *[Summer Snow](https://niklasblog.com/?p=23373)*, a far more hoity-toity poetry collection than this. They both hang on to the same sensations of summer, though, and there's nothing wrong in that.

This is a collection of poetry that appeals to the senses. It irritate me, prickled me, and also turns out quite OK. And that's it.

I'm left with few memories from the book, which is sad; I wish that I'd at the very least had been left with anger, sorrow, gladness, or anything more than a strong feeling that this book could have been improved, somehow. I can't say why, which means that I am, too, in need of improvement.