RaveThe RumpusReading Hala Alyan’s stunning collection in one sitting may be an overwhelming experience. The poems delve into memory and present imagery that evokes pain, shame, and sorrow in lyrical metaphors that are surprising and unforgettable ... The poems are not without joy and love, but in digging into the psyche, Alyan shapes a story of a haunting year in settings both geographical and psychological ... In all forms, Alyan’s lyric imagery is striking in a way that is both beautiful and violent. She presents contradictions that abound inside each of us, but in particular inside those of us in situations out of our control ... settings are brilliantly detailed ... dares to bring uncomfortable truths to its pages, and the result is a collection that probes and plunges into memory for assurances to hold onto.
Diane Seuss
RaveThe RumpusWith command of language, humor, and emotional intensity, Seuss’s work finds its home in art, philosophy, satire, and semantics, and suggests an informal salon where anything goes when considering art and aesthetics in a modern world ... These poems are so full of meaning that to try to describe them feels futile, as if descriptions might defuse their glow and remove the reader’s potential to discover each piece for themselves ... Each of these poems...recalls real lives and recognizes that irony is often a necessary component of grief ... In a number of poems, each line is a sentence, perhaps bucking the conventions of caesura and line breaks. In others, punctuation is dispensed with, and lyrical narratives emerge in streams that appear in blocks, margins flush on each side of the page. Seuss uses vernacular to unveil what lies beneath language and metaphor, to scrape the underside of meaning ... The terrible beauty of this collection is that it shows how necessary art is in helping us get through this life.
