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Loose Sugar
An elaborate collection of poems that culminate in a meditation on the possibility of a native and feminine language,
- GenresPoetry
Hardcover
First published March 21, 1997
8 people are currently reading
319 people want to read
About the author
Brenda Hillman
42 books57 followersBrenda Hillman (born March 27, 1951, in Tucson, Arizona) is an American poet and translator.
She is the author of ten collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, which was awarded the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
A professor of Creative Writing, she holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at Saint Mary's College of California, in Moraga, California.
Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2016, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
She is the author of ten collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, which was awarded the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
A professor of Creative Writing, she holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at Saint Mary's College of California, in Moraga, California.
Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2016, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 10, 2010
(i could write a whole essay on the ; in this book)
A body is a place missed specifically. They met you/ in your body, where you couldn't go alone.
The sun is the mistake that works.
within pure joy exists/ a kind of hollow,/ the inverse river, the opposite water-
A power came up; it was in between the voices./ It said you could stop making sense.
It's just that it's not quite time
to write them...What
shall I do while I'm waiting.
-Wait harder, it said.
working on the ";"
she kept on laughing
mouth into the permanent/ wild ocean that circulates the awe
A body is a place missed specifically. They met you/ in your body, where you couldn't go alone.
The sun is the mistake that works.
within pure joy exists/ a kind of hollow,/ the inverse river, the opposite water-
A power came up; it was in between the voices./ It said you could stop making sense.
It's just that it's not quite time
to write them...What
shall I do while I'm waiting.
-Wait harder, it said.
working on the ";"
she kept on laughing
mouth into the permanent/ wild ocean that circulates the awe
August 17, 2007
"they left the voices in your flesh"
"...we should
read the names carefully through fumes
rising from rainbows of spilled gas on the station floor
still pretty cheap. Full tank 13.69."
"...We wanted the perfect
heart but the energy didn't spin
one of those..."
"...we should
read the names carefully through fumes
rising from rainbows of spilled gas on the station floor
still pretty cheap. Full tank 13.69."
"...We wanted the perfect
heart but the energy didn't spin
one of those..."
December 22, 2024
There is an intimacy and an immediacy in this collection that I haven’t seen so far in her others.
August 11, 2010
What didn’t I enjoy about Loose Sugar, by Brenda Hillman? I’ll get it straight out of the way. There are moments where she references recent political details in the texts, and that just isn’t my predilection. For me, something about political details – seem bald, or unseemly. No matter how lyrically or deftly rendered – they just snap me out of the poem and conjure online news feeds. The “gulf conflict” and “Regan’s nose” feels dated, now we have the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama. There is probably a deeper explanation for why those moments bother me, why I resist them in poetry – maybe even a social –psychological reason, that I’d do well to explore. But my friend Emily feels that way about words like “tit” and “pussy” – and I don’t – so there you have it. It’s nothing to hold against a collection that is a deep joy to read.
Her suspicion of narrative – and the tension that pervades the book between telling a story and telling it slant works in a very satisfying way for this reader. The magic of poetry, when truth presented seems miraculously in tune with all versions of truth one could summon, comes from the off-tell. I want to offer a best example from the book –but the first that comes to me, is in the difference of just saying, “we missed the boys we first had sex with in cars” versus “when did you start missing those/ who invented your body with their sparks--// they didn’t mind being plural. They put/ their summer stars inside of you,// how nice to have.” (The Spark) The whole collection could be full of poems like the ones that start the collection, but there is a much larger mission here. The Spark is such an elegant rendering, it is almost like a piece of cake to catch a reader – “oh this will be easy… I know this….how beautiful!” But then, the collection wants to push and pull our understanding of everything – it investigates how we tell stories, how we make things, what we’re made of, on a space-time continuum –the history of the whole universe –the mundane details of a busy day - this dimension and in a spiritual realm. This is one ambitious collection – and it delivers. From alchemists to physicists, from the ones who love us briefly, a lifetime, or not at all, these people all hold space in the book and to me, suggests how our versions of them may likewise hold space in our lives…
The notion of “form” in a poem is both honored and dissolved with the various shapes she offers. She engages Stevens with her “C ode” in a way that gives us our money’s worth. Loose Sugar, folds in, all the levels of experience we may consider -at least the “we” who are keeping their eyes painfully open to the wholeness of the world.
Her suspicion of narrative – and the tension that pervades the book between telling a story and telling it slant works in a very satisfying way for this reader. The magic of poetry, when truth presented seems miraculously in tune with all versions of truth one could summon, comes from the off-tell. I want to offer a best example from the book –but the first that comes to me, is in the difference of just saying, “we missed the boys we first had sex with in cars” versus “when did you start missing those/ who invented your body with their sparks--// they didn’t mind being plural. They put/ their summer stars inside of you,// how nice to have.” (The Spark) The whole collection could be full of poems like the ones that start the collection, but there is a much larger mission here. The Spark is such an elegant rendering, it is almost like a piece of cake to catch a reader – “oh this will be easy… I know this….how beautiful!” But then, the collection wants to push and pull our understanding of everything – it investigates how we tell stories, how we make things, what we’re made of, on a space-time continuum –the history of the whole universe –the mundane details of a busy day - this dimension and in a spiritual realm. This is one ambitious collection – and it delivers. From alchemists to physicists, from the ones who love us briefly, a lifetime, or not at all, these people all hold space in the book and to me, suggests how our versions of them may likewise hold space in our lives…
The notion of “form” in a poem is both honored and dissolved with the various shapes she offers. She engages Stevens with her “C ode” in a way that gives us our money’s worth. Loose Sugar, folds in, all the levels of experience we may consider -at least the “we” who are keeping their eyes painfully open to the wholeness of the world.
April 5, 2008
Intelligent, lyrical, and spiritually coherent--I reread Brenda Hillman, the only experimental poet whose esoteric music is worth the work--
March 19, 2012
Watching my students struggle with and then start to understand this book made me love it even more.
February 1, 2025
loved this book !! the organization is really inch resting… very touching, lofty but personable and humorous, down to earth and head in clouds at same time… coming close to a transcendence of the autobiographical mundane perhaps or even better admitting the beauty its failure to do so ☸️🛐🧡
May 4, 2020
I'm not a huge fan of current trends in free verse as represented by this collection.
February 6, 2022
I wish I were smarter.
Read
June 20, 2022Really smart and beautiful and wonderful and
February 18, 2013
Brenda Hillman’s “Loose Sugar” is an entry in the Wesleyan Poetry Series, divided into five sections of poetry. I shall specifically be reviewing the Kindle edition.
Quotes are used from myriad sources at the beginning of each section to set the mood, from Stephen Hawking to Star Trek to an airline flight attendant. Hillman does not discriminate when it comes to sources, concerned more with what is being said than who says it.
The most prominent of techniques Hillman uses is imagery. The moon is a strip peeled off a lighthouse and an overseer of sexual secrets. Hairs lying flat around nipples are a campfire dead without a stories told. The images conjured are stories in and of them themselves, supplanting the main body of the stories Hillman crafts.
Repetition is another trick of Hillman’s trade, such as her “the flower of hell is not hell but a flower,” used to emphasize beauty even in the scorned. Or the three stars in Orion’s belt under which the secrets of love were learned, used to further the concept of intimate touches that fade away into the heavens. Hillman has a keen grasp of not only language but lyrics and deftly weaves her words into tapestries of human movements.
Some of her poetry consists of straightforward stanzas. Others exist in which she experiments with formatting, one in particular having three columns in a stanza that can be read multiple ways, reminding me that poetry is meant to be interpreted not just one way but multiple ways. Spacing between stanzas varies as well, depending on how much of a pause Hillman wishes to give between her words.
For an afternoon of lyrical poetry and an evening of pondering, I recommend Hillman’s “Loose Sugar.”
Quotes are used from myriad sources at the beginning of each section to set the mood, from Stephen Hawking to Star Trek to an airline flight attendant. Hillman does not discriminate when it comes to sources, concerned more with what is being said than who says it.
The most prominent of techniques Hillman uses is imagery. The moon is a strip peeled off a lighthouse and an overseer of sexual secrets. Hairs lying flat around nipples are a campfire dead without a stories told. The images conjured are stories in and of them themselves, supplanting the main body of the stories Hillman crafts.
Repetition is another trick of Hillman’s trade, such as her “the flower of hell is not hell but a flower,” used to emphasize beauty even in the scorned. Or the three stars in Orion’s belt under which the secrets of love were learned, used to further the concept of intimate touches that fade away into the heavens. Hillman has a keen grasp of not only language but lyrics and deftly weaves her words into tapestries of human movements.
Some of her poetry consists of straightforward stanzas. Others exist in which she experiments with formatting, one in particular having three columns in a stanza that can be read multiple ways, reminding me that poetry is meant to be interpreted not just one way but multiple ways. Spacing between stanzas varies as well, depending on how much of a pause Hillman wishes to give between her words.
For an afternoon of lyrical poetry and an evening of pondering, I recommend Hillman’s “Loose Sugar.”
August 9, 2007
The visual form of these poems (spacing, font, tabs, et cetera) is really innovative, and it stretched me as a writer at a time when, as my poetry professor put it, I kept submitting safe, "polished little gold nugget poems" at every workshop. It's good to change things up every so often. Hillman is naughty, erudite, and adventurous here. Lovely!
August 1, 2009
Fine, fine poet. You can see her experimenting with the form
December 31, 2010
My favorite poet.
July 27, 2007
My favorite collection by Hillman.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews