Extra Hidden Life, among the Days

by Brenda Hillman

Poetry of grief and sustenance from an award-winning poet

Genres: Poetry

167 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 16, 2018

About the author

Brenda 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.

Reviews

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m actually serious Brenda Hillman should be required reading for every HS student in the entire US of A

[Basia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who but Brenda Hillman can best illustrate the radical ethos of sludge-eating bacteria in oil vats, lichen that gnaws at the most obdurate rocks, and worms on the White House lawn who are "remaking / the soil by resisting it" at a Keystone Pipeline protest. Join her in spotlighting corporate absurdity: "(Microsoft doesn’t want / to paste the Polish ż in Garamond & they say / Bill Gates has 36 bedrooms)." Walk with her through leafy grief, the palpable heat of Tuscon, a national seashore. Get ready to rage/laugh/ponder/wonder, to savor syllables, and to see the world wriggle and breathe even in colors, letters, tildes and backslashes.

[Dylan]

I'm reading through Lithub's 365 Books to Start Your Climate Change Library, a reading list in four sections (Classics, Science, Fiction & Poetry, and Ideas). This book is #18 of Part 3: Fiction & Poetry and #47 overall.

This poetry is doing a lot ("experimenting with form" is maybe what you would say), but I didn't mind, & found myself enjoying it for the most part.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the themes of grief, activism and nature that wove through these poems. There were some interesting structural elements to her poems. Although I didn't love most of the poems they did make me think and reconnect to life and the big and small questions and moments that we all experience - which is what good poetry is about

[xena · Rating 4 out of 5]

favourite poems:

- [untitled day]
- curl of hair in a drawer
- the family sells the family gun
- crypto-animist introvert activism

such a unique and self-aware voice. poems about bacteria and protests and nature and capitalism.

[Ellie Botoman · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What do people need from poetry during the changes? The changes are immesurable. Perception, form, & material locked into the invisible."

[w3rmo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love her!!!!

[Rachel Y · Rating 4 out of 5]

bro I have no idea when I first started reading this ( likely 2018 ) but I restarted it from the beginning a few months ago and it was very much the collection I needed right now : somehow she blends nature and activism and play and form and life and death and speaking of death, homages to loved ones, that I could and did learn a lot from