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Vow
Poetry. If you--your charismatic, beautifully erotic self--had died young, your ghost would count itself fortunate to have lived, loved, and flamed-out in the company of the wildly imaginative author of VOW. But it's not just ghosts who find themselves envisioned, en-fabled, sometimes horrifically, in these poems: An ex-husband, ex-lovers, and dear friends also populate these questioning, often darkly humorous lyrics. Like them, the future unsettles you because you have taken vows, too, and broken them. Take heart, you hold in your hands the poetic manual for how to proceed.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2013
About the author
Rebecca Hazelton
13 books73 followersRebecca Hazelton is an award winning poet, writer, critic, and editor. Her first book, Fair Copy, won the Wheeler Prize from Ohio State University Press. Her second book, Vow, was an editor’s pick from Cleveland State University press. Gloss, published by the University of Wisconsin University Press, and was a New York Times “New and Notable” pick.
Her latest book, Generic Husband, is forthcoming from LSU Press in October — you can pre-order it now!
Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and national magazines, such as Poetry, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Boston Review. Widely anthologized, her work can be found in the Pushcart Prize anthology and Best American Poetry.
Her literary criticism has been published in Poetry, and her teaching articles have been featured on the Poetry Foundation’s Learning Lab. She is the co-editor, with poet Alan Michael Parker, of The Manifesto Project, a favorite of poetry classrooms.
Her latest book, Generic Husband, is forthcoming from LSU Press in October — you can pre-order it now!
Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and national magazines, such as Poetry, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Boston Review. Widely anthologized, her work can be found in the Pushcart Prize anthology and Best American Poetry.
Her literary criticism has been published in Poetry, and her teaching articles have been featured on the Poetry Foundation’s Learning Lab. She is the co-editor, with poet Alan Michael Parker, of The Manifesto Project, a favorite of poetry classrooms.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
April 21, 2014
I’m so impressed by how these poems are so emotive without the over-use of I. It’s something I could learn a lesson from. There are many poems here that help build an over-arching narrative without pulsing too heavily on character, setting, or theme. I also appreciate surprises in image and syntax throughout the book.
Some of my favorite moments:
“I have no words for the one in the mirror
who apes me every morning.”
“There is a certain note she holds too long.”
“The forest has reassessed its options.”
“No one thinks thinks
they are in a tragedy until they realize where the laughter should be.”
“There’s nothing in the world that loves you
as much as the space you take up.”
“As if everyone can see your stutter in the air.”
“Most of what I loved best I took in pill form.”
“Today the radishes are colored like a girl’s mouth.”
“It’s not rational
to tint the world
with shook-out sadness.”
“Are these hands?
They are holding the thing
I wanted.”
“Our dogs will be named For Now and Mostly.”
Some of my favorite moments:
“I have no words for the one in the mirror
who apes me every morning.”
“There is a certain note she holds too long.”
“The forest has reassessed its options.”
“No one thinks thinks
they are in a tragedy until they realize where the laughter should be.”
“There’s nothing in the world that loves you
as much as the space you take up.”
“As if everyone can see your stutter in the air.”
“Most of what I loved best I took in pill form.”
“Today the radishes are colored like a girl’s mouth.”
“It’s not rational
to tint the world
with shook-out sadness.”
“Are these hands?
They are holding the thing
I wanted.”
“Our dogs will be named For Now and Mostly.”
September 23, 2013
Wow, Vow!...an awesome book.
September 3, 2026
when i finished the last poem a single tear came out of my left eye
July 21, 2014
Amazing stuff! Hazelton has a great ear for sound, and I really enjoyed the semi-narrative that ties the poems in the book together. Funny in places, heartbreaking in others, what more can you ask for from a book of poems?
November 16, 2014
I wish I wrote this book.
December 21, 2018
Can't get enough of these poems.
December 31, 2014
(The formatting in Goodreads messes with the line breaks of the excerpts in this review, but I think it's still clear which parts are quotes from poems and which are my thoughts on the book. This review was first published in 32 Poems online.)
The voices of Rebecca Hazelton’s Vow express desire so sharply that even when invoked in a conceptual or abstract way it feels like a physical, mutable thing, as in “Book of Denial”:
seeing a lover naked the first time
erases the prior
lover’s body of any certainty
in your mind—
Vow’s speakers place their fears and desires in clear view. They want to be understood, but also to be unique and mysterious. They want to feel secure and know love; to be thrilled by danger and be able to betray; and to make promises, mean them and still break them. These conflicting desires play out in “Love Poem for What Is”—
When you reach out your hand and try to wheedle
someone else’s to hold it, that’s love
dominating you. There’s no word for loving more
than you should, just the feeling of excess
—and “Love Poem for What Wasn’t”:
if I couldn’t be loved
I couldn’t haunt you like a house left open,
the beds unmade,
blur my edges until my face
grows obscure but my perfume remains
In the first passage, the speaker views love as something external, a force that shapes decisions and outcomes—something that requires the individual. In the second, love is depicted as an internal force, something whose presence or absence forms a part of one’s identity (indeed, the face blurs away without its influence)—something needed by the individual.
Three sequences make up half of the collection and provide us insight into three of Hazelton’s writing modes: the “Book of” poems, a series of lyrical meditations often on abstract concepts; the fabular Fox and Rabbit poems about a anthropomorphic relationship between the two creatures; and the “Elise” poems in which the character appears as Marie Antoinette, an android at a Japanese tech festival, or simply as herself. Although sequences can come off as forced, gimmicky, or as filler, these cycles pull the reader in with their unexpected subject matter and hook-like syntactical rhythms. Additionally, they provide universally significant reckonings with identity, violence, desire, and memory, which run just below the surface of the collection.
Vow’s Fox and Rabbit poems derive much of their strength from the complications of its characters’ relationship, which are embodied in these two animal lovers whom Hazelton has drawn in a fashion that exaggerates the “animal” aspect while still making them remarkably human-like. Fox and Rabbit watch movies and squabble about small things; they are passive aggressive: “This is nice, isn’t it? I like these seats. / How far back we sit.” But, true to their animal instincts, they hunt and kill one another. Elsewhere, their behavior becomes difficult to define as distinctly animal or human:
. . . it’s your vulgar
I like best
the way you show your nape
the way your ankle
has no shame
and you bare your legs
you bare your teeth
in a smile that seems
everyone’s
property.
The bared parts say animal, but the bodies require clothes to be decent. The post-Edenic shame of nakedness insists a human point of view. The intersection of these two worlds presents itself most clearly with Fox and Rabbit, but the theme echoes throughout the book. For example, in “Book of Mercy,” the goddess Artemis transforms the hunter Actaeon into a stag. His dogs turn on him, unaware the beast is their master. Even the original mistake that led him to her blurs the human with the animal: “tracking what he thought / was a hare, and found a woman instead.”
Here, Hazelton reveals love as comprised of aggression, jealousy, vulnerability, self-protection, and both lies and truths. Threats cloak themselves in jokes: “Later we’ll play the game / where I hunt you down and kill you. I’m kidding,” immediately followed by “When you talk over the dialogue I can pretend / you’re the lead.” The lovers speak as if afraid of becoming bored. Excitement, even love, manifests as danger. In “Fox Undresses Rabbit” the act of betrayal functions as a sexual catalyst:
your mouth,
which I’d like to slip
a finger in,
which I’d like to see
mouthing
the words you promised
or at least your collarbones
said such things to me,
led me further afield than I have ever been,
far beyond the safe confines
of the measured
and mapped backyard
Like the Fox and Rabbit sequence, the Elise poems form a narrative, but this sequence in comparison seems incomplete even though the individual poems succeed on their own merit. Whereas the “Books” work as a library of lyrics with the occasional thematic or imagistic thread linking them and the Fox and Rabbit poems punctuate moments in that relationship’s narrative, Elise as a series lacks a clear construction that would serve to build something from the disparate parts. The titular character seems to be a fallen starlet whose presence as a ghost haunts the speaker, but the reasons why she appears to inhabit other figures or identities is unclear.
With some poems in this sequence, only the title directly identifies Elise—abstracted from their titles those poems would not lose any of their potency. “Elise as Android at the Japan! Culture + Hyperculture Festival” stands out among the sequence. In the poem, Vow’s focus on expectation, and the desire to have that expectation met, come into view. The poem takes the point of view of the ultra-realistic android on display at the festival. The audience asks the android questions to ascertain how humanlike it is, assuming the android will falter and fail this test. When the android surprises them (“I’m witty, I’m a lovely / hostess, I even tell a joke / about robots and chickens”), the expectations they hold are not aligned with what they perceive, and so they react aggressively. The audience’s questions rapidly change to achieve the desired outcome:
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Why does the mother spider eat her babies?
What’s prettier—a girl with a fresh bruise
or a bucket of water?
The android neither recognizes any of the violence suggested in the statement nor can it answer the questions, which allows the audience to relax, having balanced what they expect and what they observe. “They smile back, tight, satisfied,” having forced the speaker to conform to their expectations. This echoes the Fox and Rabbit poems: the display of violence as control (and understanding as a kind of control), although this poem also brings up an added layer of societal norms to consider, that of the in-group controlling the fate of those outside positions of power. Given the appearance of something that’s known to be untrue, or a ruse—in this case, the presentation of a robot as equivalent in some way to a human being—the audience deems it appropriate to forcefully excavate the object of suspicion in order to reveal what’s really inside.
A similar action appears in “Fox Dresses Rabbit”:
when I cut off your head
I feel better,
when my hands are inside you
it’s warm,
what you hid from me
These recurring themes woven throughout Vow gently tug the reader back and forth between narratives; each subsequent poem returns to someplace new but familiar, which encourages reflection on past poems and investigation of the recurring motifs. Unfolding the poems to find them unique but interlocking can be a very satisfying process for a reader willing to spend time weighing the works.
Individual animals, more than Fox and Rabbit, are ingrained in the collection, sometimes existing for half of an image—the cats unseen but present as the speaker of “First Husband” takes “your clothes that smelled like her and stuffed them / in the litter box.”—or as the focus of a poem’s contemplation, as in “Not Here to Buy the Leopard”:
Another foolish purchase, as foolish
as the way I attempt to assign personhood to the stuffed
snow leopard in the fancy furniture store on my way home,
the store that believes in the beauty of tiny chandeliers
and taxidermy eyes in a shadowbox. The snow leopard
might not even be a snow leopard, its face stretched,
as if they had a leopard skin but only
a styrofoam puma core in stock.
Hazelton employs images both lush and stark, and her precise word choice makes moments appeal to multiple senses simultaneously:
into these dreams I have
where you are always disrobing,
you drop one kimono, another,
and I never find the heavy breast
my hand was meant to cup, just
more surface, more summer.
Hazelton has proven herself to be capable of much more than just a dazzling image—from a detail-oriented standpoint, her lines break with considerable poise and the poems sway with a rhythmic energy: “Here there is skin and the sleep / that fills it, hair and the hands that part it.” Every sentence in Vow seems important to the whole. Few words go to waste. The recurring threads throughout the book are cohesive and connected. The careful attention given by the poet to the language and themes is readily apparent; much exists below the surface of these poems, a direct result of that tending.
One means by which Hazelton shows off her craft and economy of language is in her use of puns and homonyms, which effectively pull double duty; they appear to be consciously planted by the poet to signal key words and moments important to the book as a whole, but they also serve as an effective pivot—from where the reader’s expectation sits initially to where the poet wants it to be, the movement of which is telling of the collection’s themes. What a reader might assume will follow in a poem titled “Fox Dresses Rabbit” after encountering “Fox Undresses Rabbit” isn’t exactly the case. Rather, the “dress” refers to field dressing as Fox disembowels Rabbit. When the homonyms “bare” and “bear” are placed so close together—
bare your strap and bear
my weight,
which is
fever
—the themes of vulnerability and violence, desire, and the conflation of human and animal that run through the collection all converge, and thus the voices of previous poems echo. By the close of Vow there is a sense of chorus among the pieces of the collection, that the poems are all singing the same song but in their own distinct way, their various compositions, voices, and moments telling their own tale while also contributing to a story bigger than the sum of their verses.
The voices of Rebecca Hazelton’s Vow express desire so sharply that even when invoked in a conceptual or abstract way it feels like a physical, mutable thing, as in “Book of Denial”:
seeing a lover naked the first time
erases the prior
lover’s body of any certainty
in your mind—
Vow’s speakers place their fears and desires in clear view. They want to be understood, but also to be unique and mysterious. They want to feel secure and know love; to be thrilled by danger and be able to betray; and to make promises, mean them and still break them. These conflicting desires play out in “Love Poem for What Is”—
When you reach out your hand and try to wheedle
someone else’s to hold it, that’s love
dominating you. There’s no word for loving more
than you should, just the feeling of excess
—and “Love Poem for What Wasn’t”:
if I couldn’t be loved
I couldn’t haunt you like a house left open,
the beds unmade,
blur my edges until my face
grows obscure but my perfume remains
In the first passage, the speaker views love as something external, a force that shapes decisions and outcomes—something that requires the individual. In the second, love is depicted as an internal force, something whose presence or absence forms a part of one’s identity (indeed, the face blurs away without its influence)—something needed by the individual.
Three sequences make up half of the collection and provide us insight into three of Hazelton’s writing modes: the “Book of” poems, a series of lyrical meditations often on abstract concepts; the fabular Fox and Rabbit poems about a anthropomorphic relationship between the two creatures; and the “Elise” poems in which the character appears as Marie Antoinette, an android at a Japanese tech festival, or simply as herself. Although sequences can come off as forced, gimmicky, or as filler, these cycles pull the reader in with their unexpected subject matter and hook-like syntactical rhythms. Additionally, they provide universally significant reckonings with identity, violence, desire, and memory, which run just below the surface of the collection.
Vow’s Fox and Rabbit poems derive much of their strength from the complications of its characters’ relationship, which are embodied in these two animal lovers whom Hazelton has drawn in a fashion that exaggerates the “animal” aspect while still making them remarkably human-like. Fox and Rabbit watch movies and squabble about small things; they are passive aggressive: “This is nice, isn’t it? I like these seats. / How far back we sit.” But, true to their animal instincts, they hunt and kill one another. Elsewhere, their behavior becomes difficult to define as distinctly animal or human:
. . . it’s your vulgar
I like best
the way you show your nape
the way your ankle
has no shame
and you bare your legs
you bare your teeth
in a smile that seems
everyone’s
property.
The bared parts say animal, but the bodies require clothes to be decent. The post-Edenic shame of nakedness insists a human point of view. The intersection of these two worlds presents itself most clearly with Fox and Rabbit, but the theme echoes throughout the book. For example, in “Book of Mercy,” the goddess Artemis transforms the hunter Actaeon into a stag. His dogs turn on him, unaware the beast is their master. Even the original mistake that led him to her blurs the human with the animal: “tracking what he thought / was a hare, and found a woman instead.”
Here, Hazelton reveals love as comprised of aggression, jealousy, vulnerability, self-protection, and both lies and truths. Threats cloak themselves in jokes: “Later we’ll play the game / where I hunt you down and kill you. I’m kidding,” immediately followed by “When you talk over the dialogue I can pretend / you’re the lead.” The lovers speak as if afraid of becoming bored. Excitement, even love, manifests as danger. In “Fox Undresses Rabbit” the act of betrayal functions as a sexual catalyst:
your mouth,
which I’d like to slip
a finger in,
which I’d like to see
mouthing
the words you promised
or at least your collarbones
said such things to me,
led me further afield than I have ever been,
far beyond the safe confines
of the measured
and mapped backyard
Like the Fox and Rabbit sequence, the Elise poems form a narrative, but this sequence in comparison seems incomplete even though the individual poems succeed on their own merit. Whereas the “Books” work as a library of lyrics with the occasional thematic or imagistic thread linking them and the Fox and Rabbit poems punctuate moments in that relationship’s narrative, Elise as a series lacks a clear construction that would serve to build something from the disparate parts. The titular character seems to be a fallen starlet whose presence as a ghost haunts the speaker, but the reasons why she appears to inhabit other figures or identities is unclear.
With some poems in this sequence, only the title directly identifies Elise—abstracted from their titles those poems would not lose any of their potency. “Elise as Android at the Japan! Culture + Hyperculture Festival” stands out among the sequence. In the poem, Vow’s focus on expectation, and the desire to have that expectation met, come into view. The poem takes the point of view of the ultra-realistic android on display at the festival. The audience asks the android questions to ascertain how humanlike it is, assuming the android will falter and fail this test. When the android surprises them (“I’m witty, I’m a lovely / hostess, I even tell a joke / about robots and chickens”), the expectations they hold are not aligned with what they perceive, and so they react aggressively. The audience’s questions rapidly change to achieve the desired outcome:
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Why does the mother spider eat her babies?
What’s prettier—a girl with a fresh bruise
or a bucket of water?
The android neither recognizes any of the violence suggested in the statement nor can it answer the questions, which allows the audience to relax, having balanced what they expect and what they observe. “They smile back, tight, satisfied,” having forced the speaker to conform to their expectations. This echoes the Fox and Rabbit poems: the display of violence as control (and understanding as a kind of control), although this poem also brings up an added layer of societal norms to consider, that of the in-group controlling the fate of those outside positions of power. Given the appearance of something that’s known to be untrue, or a ruse—in this case, the presentation of a robot as equivalent in some way to a human being—the audience deems it appropriate to forcefully excavate the object of suspicion in order to reveal what’s really inside.
A similar action appears in “Fox Dresses Rabbit”:
when I cut off your head
I feel better,
when my hands are inside you
it’s warm,
what you hid from me
These recurring themes woven throughout Vow gently tug the reader back and forth between narratives; each subsequent poem returns to someplace new but familiar, which encourages reflection on past poems and investigation of the recurring motifs. Unfolding the poems to find them unique but interlocking can be a very satisfying process for a reader willing to spend time weighing the works.
Individual animals, more than Fox and Rabbit, are ingrained in the collection, sometimes existing for half of an image—the cats unseen but present as the speaker of “First Husband” takes “your clothes that smelled like her and stuffed them / in the litter box.”—or as the focus of a poem’s contemplation, as in “Not Here to Buy the Leopard”:
Another foolish purchase, as foolish
as the way I attempt to assign personhood to the stuffed
snow leopard in the fancy furniture store on my way home,
the store that believes in the beauty of tiny chandeliers
and taxidermy eyes in a shadowbox. The snow leopard
might not even be a snow leopard, its face stretched,
as if they had a leopard skin but only
a styrofoam puma core in stock.
Hazelton employs images both lush and stark, and her precise word choice makes moments appeal to multiple senses simultaneously:
into these dreams I have
where you are always disrobing,
you drop one kimono, another,
and I never find the heavy breast
my hand was meant to cup, just
more surface, more summer.
Hazelton has proven herself to be capable of much more than just a dazzling image—from a detail-oriented standpoint, her lines break with considerable poise and the poems sway with a rhythmic energy: “Here there is skin and the sleep / that fills it, hair and the hands that part it.” Every sentence in Vow seems important to the whole. Few words go to waste. The recurring threads throughout the book are cohesive and connected. The careful attention given by the poet to the language and themes is readily apparent; much exists below the surface of these poems, a direct result of that tending.
One means by which Hazelton shows off her craft and economy of language is in her use of puns and homonyms, which effectively pull double duty; they appear to be consciously planted by the poet to signal key words and moments important to the book as a whole, but they also serve as an effective pivot—from where the reader’s expectation sits initially to where the poet wants it to be, the movement of which is telling of the collection’s themes. What a reader might assume will follow in a poem titled “Fox Dresses Rabbit” after encountering “Fox Undresses Rabbit” isn’t exactly the case. Rather, the “dress” refers to field dressing as Fox disembowels Rabbit. When the homonyms “bare” and “bear” are placed so close together—
bare your strap and bear
my weight,
which is
fever
—the themes of vulnerability and violence, desire, and the conflation of human and animal that run through the collection all converge, and thus the voices of previous poems echo. By the close of Vow there is a sense of chorus among the pieces of the collection, that the poems are all singing the same song but in their own distinct way, their various compositions, voices, and moments telling their own tale while also contributing to a story bigger than the sum of their verses.
August 7, 2017
Vow has a lot going for it -- its architecture of sliding sequence-panels, like a stage-set under construction, its rhetorical sophistication, its performative prosody -- but most of all the audaciousness with which it traipses all over John Berryman tropes, 'cuz really, who more than Berryman deserves a traipse? I thought most of it terrific, except, perhaps, for a certain lack of the significant, the telling, detail -- that probing for the split-psyche's weights and measures . . . "[If] I couldn't be her," Hazelton writes about her narrative alter-ego, sometimes referred to as "Rabbit," though she can range from Chandler's Carmen Sternwood (in the Chandler, of course, Carmen's a pornographic model) to the rape-victim of Emma Donoghue's Room, and whose several incarnations plot the suppressed account of a love affair, "I'd be a stranger | if I couldn't be loved | I couldn't haunt you like a house left open, | the beds unmade, | blur my edges until my face | grows obscure but my perfume remains, | smoky like a campsite abandoned | and the rain hissing the fire to sleep -- this is my anger at my own fear | of mercy."
In a passage like this the craft identifies too much with the skittish rabbit-role. The images come one after another. No one is good enough, analysand is probing. Herr-narrator wants one to editorialize over, but the psycho-analyst in the narrator should have remained silent. The treatment of elision in the sequences, the blank spaces, the silences, need to be within the line, too. (As they are in Berryman.) In general I want to argue against Hazelton in this manner -- Hazelton the poet, not with any one of her flamboyant, or plucky speakers.
In a passage like this the craft identifies too much with the skittish rabbit-role. The images come one after another. No one is good enough, analysand is probing. Herr-narrator wants one to editorialize over, but the psycho-analyst in the narrator should have remained silent. The treatment of elision in the sequences, the blank spaces, the silences, need to be within the line, too. (As they are in Berryman.) In general I want to argue against Hazelton in this manner -- Hazelton the poet, not with any one of her flamboyant, or plucky speakers.
July 28, 2021
I want to preface this review by saying that, in spite of poetry being one of my favorite genres of literature, it is one of the genres I'm pickiest about. Sometimes a poetry collection can be very well-written from a technical standpoint, but for some reason, I just won't connect with it emotionally. This, unfortunately, was one of those collections for me.
What I will say this book did really well was its portrayal of fucked-up domesticity. I also enjoyed that this collection of dysfunctional love poems had a very bisexual vibe to it, and didn't feel restricted to gender norms, except when commenting on those gender norms themselves. That's refreshing for a book like this.
If I had to pinpoint something that made this a more neutral-feeling read for me, I'd say it was that a lot of the poems felt very vague. Obviously, everything doesn't need to be completely spelled out in poetry, but it should be easier than it often was here for the reader to understand what's happening, "plot"-wise, in a poem. I majored in Classics, have a minor in English writing, have done numerous poetry workshops, and wrote an original collection of poetry as my undergraduate thesis. In short, I know my stuff, so it feels like a bad sign that I had trouble grasping the meaning of some of these poems until I reread them a couple times.
In spite of some poems I felt a little more neutral (or confused) about, there were numerous pieces I really enjoyed here. My favorite poems were easily "Questions About the Wife" and "First Husband," probably because, unlike many of the poems in the collection, these felt rooted in specificity. All the Elise poems were very good as well.
What I will say this book did really well was its portrayal of fucked-up domesticity. I also enjoyed that this collection of dysfunctional love poems had a very bisexual vibe to it, and didn't feel restricted to gender norms, except when commenting on those gender norms themselves. That's refreshing for a book like this.
If I had to pinpoint something that made this a more neutral-feeling read for me, I'd say it was that a lot of the poems felt very vague. Obviously, everything doesn't need to be completely spelled out in poetry, but it should be easier than it often was here for the reader to understand what's happening, "plot"-wise, in a poem. I majored in Classics, have a minor in English writing, have done numerous poetry workshops, and wrote an original collection of poetry as my undergraduate thesis. In short, I know my stuff, so it feels like a bad sign that I had trouble grasping the meaning of some of these poems until I reread them a couple times.
In spite of some poems I felt a little more neutral (or confused) about, there were numerous pieces I really enjoyed here. My favorite poems were easily "Questions About the Wife" and "First Husband," probably because, unlike many of the poems in the collection, these felt rooted in specificity. All the Elise poems were very good as well.
September 8, 2020
This collection succeeds in creating a fantastical/nightmarish end to a marriage that at times feels like the logical dissolution of an abusive and distant relationship and at other times like a spectacular and jarring crash. It reminded me of "A Wife Is a Hope Chest" by Christine Brandel, including with its attention to wordplay and sound. My favorite poems include "Questions About the Wife," "I Love His Profile," "Love Poem For What Is," "You Are the Penultimate Love of my Life," and "Love Poem For What Wasn't." There's also a great attention to how the collection as a whole is constructed, with repetition of "Book of..." and "Elise" poems and parallels between what is/what wasn't or Atlanta and Atalanta, ties woven through various poems.
But something here—or a lack of something here—never fully clicked for me. I never felt like I could fully access the story of/with Elise, and the representation and repurposing of others felt rife with ethical difficulties, nowhere most notably as "First Husband." I think I'd need to go back and reread each poem several times, mostly out of order, to really follow everything happening on a narrative level before even trying to answer larger questions around intent and approach.
But something here—or a lack of something here—never fully clicked for me. I never felt like I could fully access the story of/with Elise, and the representation and repurposing of others felt rife with ethical difficulties, nowhere most notably as "First Husband." I think I'd need to go back and reread each poem several times, mostly out of order, to really follow everything happening on a narrative level before even trying to answer larger questions around intent and approach.
February 4, 2018
Rebecca Hazelton is a sharptongued poet with a voice that is beautiful with a hint of dark humor. The characters that make up this poignant collection invade your heart in the most unexpected way, working against themselves to make you love the speaker behind these poems even more. This poetry collection is truly a breathtaking triumph of verse. It was in this collection that I found my new favorite poem and line "There is nothing in the world that will love you more than the space you take up."
April 25, 2021
I read this book several years ago, in 2016, and I found this collection of poetry vivid and energetic. Would recommend especially for young poets interested in the shape of poems on the page.
May 31, 2015
there were a few sort of narrative pulses threaded in and out of this collection of poems (many of the titles are similar enough that you have to imagine they weren't meant to be thought of as stories working within the story).
the book is not so much about vows as how we break them. and though a lot of these poems have a sexual energy or are emotionally very evocative, that's not really what makes this collection great. i've read vow twice now and what keeps me coming back is that so many of these poems are written seemingly in the aftermath of great violence. "i hear your final word was no" we are told at the end of our introduction to elise (a character who's featured in the title of half a dozen or so of these poems). and immediately after we're confronted with the image of a possibly dead / possibly sleeping horse lying on a beach. a corpse we don't understand and have no context for. and in a way that horse is a metaphor for the rest of the collection to me. some of these poems are an open wound. some of them are darkly funny. but all of them contain some hint of the inexplicable. all of them are a thing i didn't expect to see and am afraid to touch.
the book is not so much about vows as how we break them. and though a lot of these poems have a sexual energy or are emotionally very evocative, that's not really what makes this collection great. i've read vow twice now and what keeps me coming back is that so many of these poems are written seemingly in the aftermath of great violence. "i hear your final word was no" we are told at the end of our introduction to elise (a character who's featured in the title of half a dozen or so of these poems). and immediately after we're confronted with the image of a possibly dead / possibly sleeping horse lying on a beach. a corpse we don't understand and have no context for. and in a way that horse is a metaphor for the rest of the collection to me. some of these poems are an open wound. some of them are darkly funny. but all of them contain some hint of the inexplicable. all of them are a thing i didn't expect to see and am afraid to touch.
June 20, 2016
Hazelton's poem "Book of Forget," selected for Best American Poetry 2013, is what led me to this collection. It's a striking poem and readers of "Vow" will find a bunch of other poems titled in this vein (Book of Memory, Book of Absence, Book of Longing, etc.). I appreciate this repetition. The poems are peppered throughout the volume; they are not collected in a series. Hazelton also scatters the volume with two other "series," or collections of poems with recurring characters: a character named Elise--who I believe is a lover the speaker broke her marriage up for?--whose name figures colorfully in many titles (Springtime, Elise and You're Missing All of It), and poems featuring Fox and Rabbit as characters. I like the sensual but modern/tough voice, but I can't say this volume will stick to my ribs, though I don't know if I can articulate why, especially since so many readers dug it. My favorite poems are the title poem ("Vow") and "Not Here to Buy the Leopard."
July 22, 2016
Really interested in how this collection uses the idea of a "vow" as the premise by which womanhood and sexuality are examined. Though often silenced, the speaker is determined to investigate and then renegotiate the meaning of promise, vocal or implied. The shifts in power and the use of metaphor-as-dichotomy (fox/hare, human/animal) leave no subject, speaker included, free from this scrutiny.
"I wanted to be a contortionist, / to stand on my own neck before anyone else could, / but the world is full of women who can halve themselves."
"I wanted to be a contortionist, / to stand on my own neck before anyone else could, / but the world is full of women who can halve themselves."
July 8, 2019
A very fine book of poetry, clever, insightful, confessional, satirical. I would recommend Hazelton to lovers of contemporary poetry. She rewards close reading. Several of the poems in this book deserve the accolade "great."
September 10, 2016
Micro-blurb: an impossible glass instrument of marital rupture vivisecting erotic reflection.
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