Re-SURGE
“Always a startle, the way Newell uses language so intensely, such unexpected words and combinations. A glitterpath to a completely new view. Giving us fins roots wings. Joy in vol, Deep intake, As we Lunge into spacious. ...
“I especially like the lines, ‘I see clearly who I’m clinging to.’” — Fran Shaw, writer
“In Re-SURGE, Mary Newell’s liquid undertones and songs of loss haunt quiet inquiries, and lay in astute assembly a terrace of hushed fluidity. Through flux and current, what can only grow from having spent a long time with water knowledge, carries the shifting balance of voices and bodies losing parts to the sea. Without sound land or guide, Newell’s voices astray in swell, take in like water, an invocation of internal, weightless, sonorous drift.” — Jennifer Spector, author of Hithe.
“Mary Newell’s ‘Re-SURGE’ brings us into the elemental realms of the physical and the sea-immersed. Land and water become the two surfaces for a transfiguration of both verbal and emotional revelations. In the unforgettable voices of Jenn and Meli, these poems explore the body and mind as they revel and reveal stories of their individual plights, and yet share a singular renewal of being. Their epistolary communications provide a breathtaking context for poems that urge us to consider memory, imagination, and identity. Beautiful and enticing in its forms and images, ‘Re-SURGE’ asks us to consider how the body can be both cage and harbor; in doing so, these poems provide what the best poetry does: Language as illumination.” — Philip F Clark
Poetics for the More-than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary
Edited by Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach, and Sarah Nolan, is available for pre-order from Spuyten Duyvil Press
What others say...
This amazingly capacious and intelligent collection of poems and essays is the first extended work I know to take completely seriously where poetry comes from ... Eco-concerns make us hear multiple musics in endless varied assemblages that allow us to become attuned to the many kinds of intelligences that sponsor them.
- Charles Altieri, Stageberg Professor of English, UC Berkeley
TILT/ HOVER/ VEER
Pivoting around the modular refrain “in the pith of,” the poetry chapbook TILT / HOVER / VEER depicts the planetary tilt that “shuffles the seasons,” the dynamic poise of a bird hovering, the tendency to veer as we “aim for the polestar” but “wake up awry,” and the opportunity to recover a vital orientation in the midst of life’s fluctuations.
What others say...
It is most apt that the poems in Tilt / Hover / Veer utilize the modular refrain of in the pith of, dovetailing nicely with pith’s dual meanings: spongy plant tissue and the crux of/essence. Newell’s pithy fragments capture the essence of fleeting moments in time, whole worlds of weather, and portals into the wider universe. With a calm convergence of science, nature, and delicate imagery, Mary Newell’s poems speak to us in a distilled yet expansive diction that pulses and chimes with empyrean elegance and a rhythmic beauty. This chapbook glows with fire and light.
- Cindy Hochman, editor-in-chief of First Literary Review-East