RaveThe Adroit JournalThis overflowing trove presents the evolution of Sze’s writing, tracking the germination of his language and the blooming of his style, the accumulation of his diverse interests and techniques, and his distinctive ebb and flow between the moments of bafflement and of epiphany. The experience of parsing through The Glass Constellation in its entirety left me in a state that was nothing short of astonishment ... His taut imagism links itself with classical Chinese poetry and modernists such as Pound, his sudden apostrophes evoke Rilke’s, his vanished speaker is comparable to Szymborska’s, his observational intensity is inherited from Auden and Stevens, his cerebral and self-reflective impulses are suggestive of Ashbery ... Poetry, for Sze, is a way of coming to terms with the world, for which the strange feeling of being in this world always outruns our understanding of what it means to be in this world. His poems, in their lush enigma, replicate our lived encounter with the shimmering contours of this life ... The final poems of The Glass Constellation convey this planetary intimacy—both soothing and unnerving, erotic and potentially fatal—which enwraps us all.
Michelle Zauner
RaveThe Adroit JournalThe memoir imparts a sense of love which compels me beyond the point of recognizing my own mother in Zauner’s. Rather, it leaves me in awe of how Zauner has also drawn me into mourning the death of her mother ... Through Zauner’s prose, we waver between the contradictory sentiments of estrangement and intimacy toward her mother, paralleling Zauner’s own characterization of her maternal relationship ... As much as it is a linear narrative, the memoir also feels like an assemblage of literary vignettes which remind us of the innumerable ways in which Zauner misses her mother. Through these fascinatingly odd juxtapositions, Zauner reproduces the feeling of how grief always rears its head in the most unexpected places ... Zauner’s prose is both sober-eyed and harrowing in its descriptions of the progression of her mother’s cancer, the exhaustion of her mother’s caretakers, and the bewildering grief which consumes their family. This incredible memoir is never funny without also being heart-rending.
