Crawlers (December 2006)By Nathalie AndersonISBN: 978-0-912592-59-6Crawlers is the co-winner of the 2005 Robert McGovern Publication Prize. Listed as a Best Book for Fall 2006 by The Montserrat Review Book Review Editor Grace Cavalieri Available from: Ashland Bookstore | Amazon
- Denise Duhamel "Don't write about this," says a character in Crawlers - and Nathalie Anderson answers with a devastating poem... Crawlers is like a brocade tapestry: Move in to see the beautiful precision stitchery, stand back to perceive the splendid overall design. All darkness and light, nerviness and yearning, wit and skill, Anderson's macro and micro are matters of both moral integrity and linguistic dazzle; the emotional charge that emanates from these terrific poems comes out of a sophisticated melding of the two. This is a book of big stories and subtle music. - Daisy Fried Nathalie Anderson's subjects range from the small specific pests of our skins - mosquito, thunderfly, gnat - to such abstractions as her lyric meditation on the power of what we don't see even when we believe we're looking. There's gore and there's sublimity; there's plenitude heaped upon plenitude. Her lines display the precise attentions of darning, while the scale can be multigenerational, mythological. Her language is sensuous, scientific, and intimate, impasto with etymological love. Finally I can't describe this book, but you can enter it on your own, get lost inside its riches, and return with admiring eyes - having discovered, as Anderson says "what words - her words - might do." - Albert Goldbarth Nathalie Anderson's poems combine great strength with great delicacy. They rise from courage and candor, and they attain - reverberant, many layered, richly musical - a beauty that both contains and transcends their accounts of pain and kinship, wonder and sorrow, isolation and mystery. I admire this powerful book tremendously. - David Young
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