LATEST REVIEWS - updated 2/2007

The Other Side of Landscape: An Anthology of Contemporary Nordic Poetry

* SvD - Det nordiska blir tydligt i oversatta dikter
(Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm-based daily newspaper of Sweden)

On the whole, then, the poets in this collection put the contemporary before mystical effect. If they have read Tranströmer, they have taken just as much from The New Simplicity, (Nyenkelheten) a pan-Scandinavian movement that emerged in the 1960s with a blend of Althusserian politics and earnest protests against the Vietnam War.
- Johannes Goransson, Rain Taxi

Isa the Truck Named Isadore:

These poems practically beg us to read them aloud—they have the virtues, not of short stories, but of out-loud, audience-conscious storytelling. ... Nadelberg's self-confident and quirky system suggests Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons ("Myrtle will be married / and green and warm"). Her backpedaling humilities and the acoustics of her short free-verse lines, with so many anticlimaxes and charming stumbles, share much with the poetry of James Schuyler. ... No book in recent memory has sounded as waifish, as faux-naif, as given to winks and shrugs; no recent poet has made those qualities into such virtues.
- Stephen Burt, The Believer

Simple as it appears at first, Amanda Nadelberg's world becomes more involving the more time you spend with it.  There is more at stake each time. The light, humorous tone is made to do double duty—comic and tragic.  In this sense, the author has imagined an oddly complete emotional world by deliberately limiting its contents.
- Mike McDonough, Coldfront Magazine

Who's Who Vivid:

* Verse
* Octopus
* Diagram
* Coldfront Magazine
* Rock Salt Plum Review
* H_NGM_N
* Interview with Matt Hart at Small Spiral Notebook

The Goddess of the Hunt is Not Herself:

* Cutbank (Summer 2006)

Like Wind Loves a Window:

At the center of this collection the ordinary commingles with the extraordinary, the "small fact of [our] life on the block" with the simultaneous mystery of our existence "in the long black glow." These poems lead us along the wild and "errant edge" of understanding, and we are left where the poet places us, to "walk into the morning from off / the bed."
- Stefania Heim, Boston Review

Baker's poems are exquisitely crafted wooden cases—inlaid with shining mother-of-pearl moments of discovery and opening to reveal mysterious depths within their lovely lines.
- Tamiko Beyer, Boxcar Poetry Review

[Baker is] brilliant in her self-awareness conceived in images: "my broken egg eyes." Whatever comes before her turns into a microcosmic and subjective reflection of the initial object, which expands perspective to vastest proportions and gives possibility and imagination dominion over knowability and memory.
- Matthew Henriksen, Burning Chair

What works best in Baker's poems is a heightened sense of imagery. Sometimes, as with "House," which is partially composed of drawings, the imagery is quiet literal. Other times, it is Baker's finely tuned sense of seeing: she sees a "historical blue/machine gun sky," "a human head composed of leaves," and "a rabid cat ran from a rabid dog, laughing."
- Jennifer Bartlett, Galatea Resurrection

Baker…offers some hope about turning chaos into form, harnessing obsession with a poem's visceral elements, and allowing that obsession finally to feed the poem, the way "the window waits to be fed / one minute more."
- Bridget Cross, Octopus

Baker's work acts like a curious window, one that gives us glimpses—visually stunning, strange, haunting—of a landscape that seems both deeply interior and otherworldly at the same time… One must see the sparsely placed words on the page, islands amidst the overwhelming blankness, and read the lines that resist comfort and resolution, however warmed they are by the narrator's undeniably human voice.
- Laura Sims, How2

These are very quiet poems ... [they have] the subtle quality of the sound of snow falling, which, at first, goes unnoticed and then suddenly becomes overwhelmingly beautiful.
- Craig Teicher, Cutbank

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