Topic: Heather Spears

I’ve always preferred lyric poetry, and these poems are anything but. The stanzas are straightforward, the breaks seemingly arbitrary, the momentum dependent on strings of substantives cascading down a rough bed. There is hardly any imagery. The lines are abbreviated, the matter presented in chunks without articles, so condensed that reading them is like cutting […]

Forge is a book of extraordinarily beautiful poems. The book appears suspended—even the print floating just off the page. Reading it or even thinking about it, I have a strong sense of being physically slowed down, of holding my breath. It is not only Zwicky’s subject matter and imagery, but her exact and meticulous poetics. […]