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Field Music
A collection of poetry from the 2019 winner of the National Poetry Series, selected by Rosanna Warren
In her remarkable and assured debut, Alexandria Hall explores the boundaries and limits of language, place, and the self, as well as the complicated space between safety and danger, intimacy and isolation, playfulness and seriousness, home and away. With a keen eye for the importance of place, Hall shows us daily life in rural Vermont, illuminating the beauty and difficulty inherent in the dichotomies of human language and experience.
Incisive and tender, Field Music is a thoughtful and alert collection from a major emerging voice.
In her remarkable and assured debut, Alexandria Hall explores the boundaries and limits of language, place, and the self, as well as the complicated space between safety and danger, intimacy and isolation, playfulness and seriousness, home and away. With a keen eye for the importance of place, Hall shows us daily life in rural Vermont, illuminating the beauty and difficulty inherent in the dichotomies of human language and experience.
Incisive and tender, Field Music is a thoughtful and alert collection from a major emerging voice.
128 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 6, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
May 24, 2020
I receive a digital galley of Field Music in exchange for a fair review. In her first book of poetry, the 2019 winner of the National Poetry Series, selected by Rosanna Warren, there is evidence of a very skilled poet, but who has yet come into a consistent voice. Her best poems are written in a straight forward, narrative way that slowly build accretive details in an assured and confident manner that are masterful. Take for example the start of the poem “The Lake House”— “Ferrisburgh keeps nothing but the smell of skunk and lilacs/and the two lines of the headlights swimming/over the dirt road like sturgeon under the water.” Another poem, “Fishing,” describes her father baiting the hook for her (“...I didn’t want to bait the hook so he did it for me. It must/have been like a prick in a soft grape, a thumbtack through a baby’s/finger.” This is a description that highlights the benefit of hearing from a young poet using objects like a grape and thumbtack, whereas an older, more experienced poet probably would have missed the objects of childhood. There is evidence of this empathy and understanding in many of Hall’s poems along with some James Wright-like harsh beauty: “The peonies/glutted and collapsed on the driveway in June./ I am undone, not by grief, but abundance (Having Been).”
It is therefore unfortunate that several poems told from a “slant-like” perspective are less successful. Here is the title poem, “Field Music,”—“Wringing out the wind chimes, the night leaves/a hole for a spotlight and my hands callous/over the goat’s singing. Somebody killed/my cat, not in the way Dad made the sheep/click. You know, I’ve got half a mind to halve /you, hot as a Salamander, foul as a skidsteer.” There is not coherence in the slanted perspectives Hall puts in this poem (and others) that although the reader can follow the logic of the poem to its conclusion, it comes across as gimmicky in my opinion. Here is another example in the poem “On Art,”—“Art is beautiful. What is beautiful is true. When the imagination/ seizes it, you should never put a spoon in its mouth. It is nice to be/stirred, but alarming to be shaken. You shook me all night long. I/ said shake, rattle, and roll. This is a test of the emergency broadcast/system. This is a false alarm, This is a downright lie.”
Although a flawed first book, Hall has an abundance of talent and I eagerly look forward to her next book.
It is therefore unfortunate that several poems told from a “slant-like” perspective are less successful. Here is the title poem, “Field Music,”—“Wringing out the wind chimes, the night leaves/a hole for a spotlight and my hands callous/over the goat’s singing. Somebody killed/my cat, not in the way Dad made the sheep/click. You know, I’ve got half a mind to halve /you, hot as a Salamander, foul as a skidsteer.” There is not coherence in the slanted perspectives Hall puts in this poem (and others) that although the reader can follow the logic of the poem to its conclusion, it comes across as gimmicky in my opinion. Here is another example in the poem “On Art,”—“Art is beautiful. What is beautiful is true. When the imagination/ seizes it, you should never put a spoon in its mouth. It is nice to be/stirred, but alarming to be shaken. You shook me all night long. I/ said shake, rattle, and roll. This is a test of the emergency broadcast/system. This is a false alarm, This is a downright lie.”
Although a flawed first book, Hall has an abundance of talent and I eagerly look forward to her next book.
May 30, 2020
Alexandria Hall is a poet to watch. She brings a nicely postmodern sensibility to her poems; just look at this set of citations for her poem 'On Art':
"'On Art' borrows bits of language from Rilke's *Letters to a Young Poet.* 'Achy Breaky Heart,' written by Don Von Tress and performed by Billy Ray Cyrus, Keat's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey, AC/DC's 'You Shook Me All Night Long,' and 'Shake, Rattle, and Roll' by Jesse Stone a.k.a Charles E. Calhoun."
But at the same time her poems are full of emotion and longing and loss and anger and heartbreak and lust, such as this from 'Cowbird':
"All of this damage is already done:
the meadows inflamed and gone blonde with rash goldenrod. Nothing ever stays
where it ought: runoff dragged into the river
by summer rains from s***-covered fields - my thickly perfumed Vermont. The morning
glories creep up the shafts of the garden
vegetables, their seductive curls choking out my small plot. Sometimes we can't see
the dangers we feed, that we nurture,
like the warbler who cares for the cowbird planted in her nest"
Holy cow. Poems like this, and the poems memorializing her redneckish dad moved me. These poems are about combinations, or high and low culture, of urban and rural, of two bodies coming together in the summer heat separated by culture and language, of reconciling the nature and nurture that combined to create you, of reconciling the difference inside you. This isn't a perfect volume of poetry; some of the poems felt a little forced in voice or composition (like, unfortunately, 'On Art' whose notes I showed above), but the talent on display here in the best poems is worth your time.
**Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
"'On Art' borrows bits of language from Rilke's *Letters to a Young Poet.* 'Achy Breaky Heart,' written by Don Von Tress and performed by Billy Ray Cyrus, Keat's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey, AC/DC's 'You Shook Me All Night Long,' and 'Shake, Rattle, and Roll' by Jesse Stone a.k.a Charles E. Calhoun."
But at the same time her poems are full of emotion and longing and loss and anger and heartbreak and lust, such as this from 'Cowbird':
"All of this damage is already done:
the meadows inflamed and gone blonde with rash goldenrod. Nothing ever stays
where it ought: runoff dragged into the river
by summer rains from s***-covered fields - my thickly perfumed Vermont. The morning
glories creep up the shafts of the garden
vegetables, their seductive curls choking out my small plot. Sometimes we can't see
the dangers we feed, that we nurture,
like the warbler who cares for the cowbird planted in her nest"
Holy cow. Poems like this, and the poems memorializing her redneckish dad moved me. These poems are about combinations, or high and low culture, of urban and rural, of two bodies coming together in the summer heat separated by culture and language, of reconciling the nature and nurture that combined to create you, of reconciling the difference inside you. This isn't a perfect volume of poetry; some of the poems felt a little forced in voice or composition (like, unfortunately, 'On Art' whose notes I showed above), but the talent on display here in the best poems is worth your time.
**Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
June 16, 2020
thank you so much to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC! this book was so incredibly beautiful. i loved the approach to setting. each poem set up a gorgeous landscape that intertwined between rural and urban life and built out a universal family. while it didn’t feel like every single poem was connected, i never found myself disliking the flow; it continued on smoothly and effectively. loved this collection!
October 10, 2020
The most beautiful book. I can't recommend it more highly. Lyric, sensual, incisive, and so moving. Also kinda like farm sexy.
August 20, 2020
What a gorgeous, lush collection. Each poem moves like a breeze and there were so many lines that made me pause and stare out the window. Hall's debut is at once aching and sexy, grieving and quiet. I love the way Hall builds her landscapes, how quick flashes of image, like a robin's egg, act as startling anchors, how certain lines drop to wet the heads of the lines beneath them.
In the park by the falls, I watched a man / eating. Between his legs / his dog waited for a scrap. To feed is to care, / not to crave, or carve.
What a stunning book. I can't wait to read and re-read it again and again.
Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this.
In the park by the falls, I watched a man / eating. Between his legs / his dog waited for a scrap. To feed is to care, / not to crave, or carve.
What a stunning book. I can't wait to read and re-read it again and again.
Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this.
September 26, 2020
Poetry is a very personal experience and what resonates with one might not ring true with another. Hall explores life in rural Vermont in this accomplished collection- although much of the imagery holds true for farm life anywhere. Put this at bedside and read one each night to fully appreciate the language and keep it fresh. Or, alternately, read the whole thing in a gulp and then go back to savor each poem a second time. Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC.
February 21, 2023
* An ARC was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Receiving said copy in no way influenced my opinion of this book*
This was my first read by Alexandria Hall and I am happy to say I hope it isn't my last. Hall has a way of writing that is deep and soul punching. Their words are so expressive that even when they don't come right out and say it, I still fully understand what they mean, something I struggle with a lot when reading poetry. We got a glimpse into their life in these beautiful and wordy fragments. And while their life wasn't the most beautiful, they way they tell their story is.
This was my first read by Alexandria Hall and I am happy to say I hope it isn't my last. Hall has a way of writing that is deep and soul punching. Their words are so expressive that even when they don't come right out and say it, I still fully understand what they mean, something I struggle with a lot when reading poetry. We got a glimpse into their life in these beautiful and wordy fragments. And while their life wasn't the most beautiful, they way they tell their story is.
May 17, 2020
This poetry collection was uniquely filled with rural tension, using farm-like metaphors in a way I've never heard done so lyrically, with so much hunger. While the jarring shifts between lines took time to get used to, the deeper darker elements of the pieces shone through. "Home / is where the mail goes," the narrator says in "Walking in Reverse," and we can relate. "Practice Test for Insatiable Loneliness" is a multiple choice test with no answer key. There is a simplicity in how harsh and violent bodies are described, again mirroring the mentality of farm life. I got a bit lost in the abstract jumbling of pieces like "Contrition," but appreciated the idea of confusion, embraced the uncertainty of what I was supposed to understand.. "On Art" and "Return" were definitely favorites in the collection because of the connections with past artists combined with a shared longing. The important people in these stories are nameless and yet they make crucial decisions, life-altering mistakes over and over. This allows us to seep into the stories and make the characters our man we love, our mother, our baby girl. Fullness, emptiness, everything between the two - these lines ache along this chasm.
February 25, 2025
I really liked this. Very smart poetry with lots of yearning, ache, gaps, needs to be filled.
.
My faves were:
The First Time —yes, that first time. Lots of sex in this collection, both explicit and implied.
The Lake House—I really loved this one although I did not fully understand it.
Having Been—last line alert!! Also this is me, drawing the 10/P every time I feel bereft.
Dredge—one of many intense rural small-town America poems here.
Lilac Ode—your finicky buds is right.
.
Some of it went over my head but what I liked, I really liked.
.
My faves were:
The First Time —yes, that first time. Lots of sex in this collection, both explicit and implied.
The Lake House—I really loved this one although I did not fully understand it.
Having Been—last line alert!! Also this is me, drawing the 10/P every time I feel bereft.
Dredge—one of many intense rural small-town America poems here.
Lilac Ode—your finicky buds is right.
.
Some of it went over my head but what I liked, I really liked.
June 9, 2021
Youth, love, place and melancholy woven quietly together in nice collection.
October 10, 2020
This is a book of poems, and an excellent one. I have never been to Vermont, but after reading Hall's book I believe I have. Her lyrics take me there. Her use of language is gorgeous. Cannot recommend enough.
December 20, 2020
From my review for Seven Days:
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/b...
Right out of the gate, Alexandria Hall's astonishing debut Field Music, winner of the $10,000 National Poetry Series, announces itself as a whole new kind of Vermont poetry. "Dad says he can sing like a Kawasaki. He says / he's got some good idears," Hall's narrator tells us in the title poem. A few lines later: "I know about sex. It's a not a cardinal / flying into the wrong window." The poem ends: "Dad hit / Grandpa till the state troopers strobed / the kitchen, staining my sweater. Grandma says / creek like crick and I wait for the violins. // If you keep kicking somebody, music / will come out eventually."
Hall's song is an unflinching and exquisitely lyrical depiction of growing up in working-class, rural Vermont. Absent are the pastoral clichés that have calcified over the past half-century, the flatlander gaze, the cardinal bearing a pat metaphor in its beak. Instead, Hall shows us a contemporary Vermont that's instantly recognizable to those who've grown up here: going muddin', virginity lost in cornfields, the kick of a .22, ticks, fertilizer runoff, and spitting dip.
These images come alive in part because of Hall's deft code-switching between poetic diction and rural Vermont syntax. "On Beauty," a prose poem, begins: "He run out of propane and the cold licked the trailer like a dog with a hurt paw. Pa, my brother would have called him, if I'd had a brother, if I'd a been him, had he been at all." Later on, this same voice splices Rainer Maria Rilke quotes with pop-music lyrics, all while flitting in and out of her grandmother's idiom and her own.
Hall uses startlingly fresh language to convey a complex range of emotions that travel far beyond the borders of a small town. Illnesses and accidents haunt the book, as do yearning, vulnerability and self-discovery. At one point the narrator admits, "I left home like a tick / leaves the tall grass"; several poems travel to Spain, Peru, Germany, and Brooklyn.
In "Travel Narrative" Hall writes, "Remember I wanted to go home, / which was a shadow, so I didn't." This narrator constantly circles back, searching for more precise means of expression. Often it is cryptic, but gorgeously so: "There was too much moon over the night in Middlebury / so I put a man's face in front of it, and then I loved / that man."
Sometimes Hall's search manifests in creating whole new forms, as in "Practice Test for Insatiable Loneliness" (one of several superbly original titles, along with "I Contain Myself Needfully" and "Something Important Put Clumsily Away"). Written in the form of an SAT exam, it begins:
1. Absence
a) makes the heart grow in vines up the latticework.
b) makes dinner and leaves the dishes.
c) makes change like the man at the laundromat, carefully on the wooden counter.
d) makes love cruelly.
Though never heavy-handed, certain poems in Field Music are acutely aware of class: "I used to hear it as, making ends meat." Halfway through the book, Hall's narrator says, "At the lake house I was strange, surrounded / by nice things, trying on fancy clothes or posing / nude before the grand bay windows." When she says, "Home is where the mail goes," it means something very different from the problems of owning two or three houses. These moments of class perspective heighten everything that surrounds them, adding an element of authenticity that's refreshingly free of masculine asceticism.
Hall grew up in Addison County. A first-generation college student, she studied with Major Jackson at the University of Vermont. Music scene cognoscenti will likely remember her not as a poet but as "Burlington's queen of woozy soul," as this paper put it in a 2010 feature, performing her original electronic music as tooth ache. and later as Beth Head. Father/Daughter Records released a 7-inch vinyl of her music, and Hall even filmed a music video at the legendary Shenanigans bowling alley/strip club in White River Junction.
For now, literature seems to be winning out in vying for Hall's creative energy. After UVM, she won a lucrative Beinecke Scholarship to attend New York University's master's program in poetry. Currently, she's pursuing a PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
In Hall's closing piece, "People Fall All the Time," the strands of pain and intimacy that weave throughout the book are braided together, transmitting a vernacular music. The final stanza ends, "He said Manual labor. He said The fall / as something you can take. He suffered / a break in a lonely way. Lo hello high hay, / the words in the marrow, the sow and the mare, Oh— / what stays are the song and the crash / of the tractor, the trash compactor, the machines / full of love and the fields full of breaking, / the fields where the light slips out."
In Field Music, a meteoric young writer shrugs off decades of stale narrative tradition and subject matter. In its place come dazzling lyricism and innovation, and a glimpse of Vermont that has long deserved to have its story told in its own voice.
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/b...
Right out of the gate, Alexandria Hall's astonishing debut Field Music, winner of the $10,000 National Poetry Series, announces itself as a whole new kind of Vermont poetry. "Dad says he can sing like a Kawasaki. He says / he's got some good idears," Hall's narrator tells us in the title poem. A few lines later: "I know about sex. It's a not a cardinal / flying into the wrong window." The poem ends: "Dad hit / Grandpa till the state troopers strobed / the kitchen, staining my sweater. Grandma says / creek like crick and I wait for the violins. // If you keep kicking somebody, music / will come out eventually."
Hall's song is an unflinching and exquisitely lyrical depiction of growing up in working-class, rural Vermont. Absent are the pastoral clichés that have calcified over the past half-century, the flatlander gaze, the cardinal bearing a pat metaphor in its beak. Instead, Hall shows us a contemporary Vermont that's instantly recognizable to those who've grown up here: going muddin', virginity lost in cornfields, the kick of a .22, ticks, fertilizer runoff, and spitting dip.
These images come alive in part because of Hall's deft code-switching between poetic diction and rural Vermont syntax. "On Beauty," a prose poem, begins: "He run out of propane and the cold licked the trailer like a dog with a hurt paw. Pa, my brother would have called him, if I'd had a brother, if I'd a been him, had he been at all." Later on, this same voice splices Rainer Maria Rilke quotes with pop-music lyrics, all while flitting in and out of her grandmother's idiom and her own.
Hall uses startlingly fresh language to convey a complex range of emotions that travel far beyond the borders of a small town. Illnesses and accidents haunt the book, as do yearning, vulnerability and self-discovery. At one point the narrator admits, "I left home like a tick / leaves the tall grass"; several poems travel to Spain, Peru, Germany, and Brooklyn.
In "Travel Narrative" Hall writes, "Remember I wanted to go home, / which was a shadow, so I didn't." This narrator constantly circles back, searching for more precise means of expression. Often it is cryptic, but gorgeously so: "There was too much moon over the night in Middlebury / so I put a man's face in front of it, and then I loved / that man."
Sometimes Hall's search manifests in creating whole new forms, as in "Practice Test for Insatiable Loneliness" (one of several superbly original titles, along with "I Contain Myself Needfully" and "Something Important Put Clumsily Away"). Written in the form of an SAT exam, it begins:
1. Absence
a) makes the heart grow in vines up the latticework.
b) makes dinner and leaves the dishes.
c) makes change like the man at the laundromat, carefully on the wooden counter.
d) makes love cruelly.
Though never heavy-handed, certain poems in Field Music are acutely aware of class: "I used to hear it as, making ends meat." Halfway through the book, Hall's narrator says, "At the lake house I was strange, surrounded / by nice things, trying on fancy clothes or posing / nude before the grand bay windows." When she says, "Home is where the mail goes," it means something very different from the problems of owning two or three houses. These moments of class perspective heighten everything that surrounds them, adding an element of authenticity that's refreshingly free of masculine asceticism.
Hall grew up in Addison County. A first-generation college student, she studied with Major Jackson at the University of Vermont. Music scene cognoscenti will likely remember her not as a poet but as "Burlington's queen of woozy soul," as this paper put it in a 2010 feature, performing her original electronic music as tooth ache. and later as Beth Head. Father/Daughter Records released a 7-inch vinyl of her music, and Hall even filmed a music video at the legendary Shenanigans bowling alley/strip club in White River Junction.
For now, literature seems to be winning out in vying for Hall's creative energy. After UVM, she won a lucrative Beinecke Scholarship to attend New York University's master's program in poetry. Currently, she's pursuing a PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
In Hall's closing piece, "People Fall All the Time," the strands of pain and intimacy that weave throughout the book are braided together, transmitting a vernacular music. The final stanza ends, "He said Manual labor. He said The fall / as something you can take. He suffered / a break in a lonely way. Lo hello high hay, / the words in the marrow, the sow and the mare, Oh— / what stays are the song and the crash / of the tractor, the trash compactor, the machines / full of love and the fields full of breaking, / the fields where the light slips out."
In Field Music, a meteoric young writer shrugs off decades of stale narrative tradition and subject matter. In its place come dazzling lyricism and innovation, and a glimpse of Vermont that has long deserved to have its story told in its own voice.
November 11, 2022
It's not my place to put myself at the bottom of the creek.
Field Music és un bon primer recull. Hall ens presenta el seu Vermont rural, armat de tota mena de detalls sòrdids. La granja, l'aiguamoll i la casa basteixen els paisatges dels poemes més narratius del llibre, que no necessàriament són els millors. Tot i que a la veu lírica li falta, potser, una certa cohesió -en molts aspectes es fa palés que Field Music és un recull de poemes i no un poemari pensat unitàriament-, hi ha moltes proves que averen la potencialitat d'Alexandria Hall.
Compartisc un dels nombrosos poemes que m'han encantat. Incloc "Home" per qüestions d'extensió, però ben bé podria haver inclòs "Practice Test for Insatiable Loneliness", una mena d'examen tipus test, o "Desire" una reflexió que posa en paral·lel l'adquisició d'una nova llengua amb l'adveniment del desig.
HOME
Why a man's sink always has a smell.
Why you told her her cheeks jiggle
when she walks. Why not touch a baby
bird. How the plow drags the snow.
Who answers the door. IF the window's painted
shut. When you're being ugly. Where to meet
if separated. If your feet are wet. why the stain
won't come out. What it looks like
in the bathroom mirror. When the smoke
filled the dining room. Where it hurts.
If you did your best but. How it sounds
when it's touched. When they burned the nest.
Field Music és un bon primer recull. Hall ens presenta el seu Vermont rural, armat de tota mena de detalls sòrdids. La granja, l'aiguamoll i la casa basteixen els paisatges dels poemes més narratius del llibre, que no necessàriament són els millors. Tot i que a la veu lírica li falta, potser, una certa cohesió -en molts aspectes es fa palés que Field Music és un recull de poemes i no un poemari pensat unitàriament-, hi ha moltes proves que averen la potencialitat d'Alexandria Hall.
Compartisc un dels nombrosos poemes que m'han encantat. Incloc "Home" per qüestions d'extensió, però ben bé podria haver inclòs "Practice Test for Insatiable Loneliness", una mena d'examen tipus test, o "Desire" una reflexió que posa en paral·lel l'adquisició d'una nova llengua amb l'adveniment del desig.
HOME
Why a man's sink always has a smell.
Why you told her her cheeks jiggle
when she walks. Why not touch a baby
bird. How the plow drags the snow.
Who answers the door. IF the window's painted
shut. When you're being ugly. Where to meet
if separated. If your feet are wet. why the stain
won't come out. What it looks like
in the bathroom mirror. When the smoke
filled the dining room. Where it hurts.
If you did your best but. How it sounds
when it's touched. When they burned the nest.
December 29, 2020
Alexandria Hall shows promise as a rising young poet, especially in the first section of this collection. The poems I admired in the first half were: "Cowbird," "The Body at Night," "Walking in Reverse," "In the Nets," and "The Lake House."
In the second section (of two), I found myself noticing more of the trademarks of the M.F.A. writing workshop, the poems wearing the craft assignments of professors on their "sleeves." My appreciation of the collection as a whole perhaps suffered because of my mature perspective--another way of saying "I'm old." Or at least I felt from my vantage of 50+ years that the content of Hall's poems were a bit limited by her range of experience. The topics covered included parents, the geographic landscape of her upbringing, coming of age (sexually and in self-awareness), and addresses to a lover. All topics to be expected and ones that didn't stir me as they might have when I was 21 years old.
Based on the technique and language here, Hall's future collections have the potential to be worth some attention, provided adulthood experiences provide more depth and something to say.
In the second section (of two), I found myself noticing more of the trademarks of the M.F.A. writing workshop, the poems wearing the craft assignments of professors on their "sleeves." My appreciation of the collection as a whole perhaps suffered because of my mature perspective--another way of saying "I'm old." Or at least I felt from my vantage of 50+ years that the content of Hall's poems were a bit limited by her range of experience. The topics covered included parents, the geographic landscape of her upbringing, coming of age (sexually and in self-awareness), and addresses to a lover. All topics to be expected and ones that didn't stir me as they might have when I was 21 years old.
Based on the technique and language here, Hall's future collections have the potential to be worth some attention, provided adulthood experiences provide more depth and something to say.
March 27, 2023
Field Music evokes a wide range of emotions for the reader. As someone who likes poetry but does not read it often I felt it was a little bit of a challenge to start. I read poems over multiple times to gain a deeper understanding. Much like with many collections of poems, some will connect with the read more than others. I will not cite a specific poem from Alexandria Hall as being the most connected to or a favorite, simply because I think poems hit everybody differently.
That being said, I believe the use of language in this collection is very unique, creating a rhythm like a song or sometimes a monologue. Each poem connects the physical world to Hall's human experience, and I felt like I was getting to know a stranger for the first time. I have never read Hall's work before so it was refreshing to read.
I think this book would be great for someone who knows their way around poetry very well, or someone who is willing to research the context of the poetry.
That being said, I believe the use of language in this collection is very unique, creating a rhythm like a song or sometimes a monologue. Each poem connects the physical world to Hall's human experience, and I felt like I was getting to know a stranger for the first time. I have never read Hall's work before so it was refreshing to read.
I think this book would be great for someone who knows their way around poetry very well, or someone who is willing to research the context of the poetry.
June 2, 2020
Poet Alexandria Hall's first full book of poetry brings rural American farm experiences to life with vivid, sensual descriptions of the natural world and a person's place in it. The most effective poems convey hunger and yearning, pain and intimacy through the use of language that pulls relentlessly at the reader's imagination. Some poems seem to be a jumble of unrelated images and cultural references that remain too disconnected at the end, leaving this reader to wonder how it all fit together.
I look forward to reading more of her work as Alexandria Hall develops her poetic voice. For now, this volume remains an interesting and sometimes luminous addition to my poetry collection.#NetGalley, #FieldMusic
I look forward to reading more of her work as Alexandria Hall develops her poetic voice. For now, this volume remains an interesting and sometimes luminous addition to my poetry collection.#NetGalley, #FieldMusic
June 21, 2024
Home
Why a man's sink always has a smell.
Why you told her her cheeks jiggle
when she walks. Why not to touch a baby
bird. How the plow drags the snow.
Who answers the door. If the window's painted
shut. When you're being ugly. Where to meet
if separated. If your feet are wet. Why the stain
won't come out. What it looks like
in the bathroom mirror. When the smoke
filled the dining room. Where it hurts.
If you did your best but. How it sounds
when it's touched. When they burned the nest.
Why a man's sink always has a smell.
Why you told her her cheeks jiggle
when she walks. Why not to touch a baby
bird. How the plow drags the snow.
Who answers the door. If the window's painted
shut. When you're being ugly. Where to meet
if separated. If your feet are wet. Why the stain
won't come out. What it looks like
in the bathroom mirror. When the smoke
filled the dining room. Where it hurts.
If you did your best but. How it sounds
when it's touched. When they burned the nest.
December 27, 2022
Not bad, but just not my type of poetry. The word use was interesting, and there were a couple poems that had a very natural rhythm that I enjoyed, but I didn't feel drawn to any poems in particular, which I usually end up doing with poetry books. I'm glad I read this though, it was part of my 2022 new years resolution to read more poetry!
November 10, 2024
I really admire Hall's ability to write a narrative poem without falling into linearity. She's an observer who creates a scene or network of relations through pointillism— images or ideas that add up to a vague picture. Some of the poems absolutely blew me away; other lacked something...consistency, sureness maybe. If she came out with another collection, I'd get my hands on it.
April 5, 2021
Wonderful new poet. Lyrical, funny, poignant and sad. As adept as deploying the aesthetic of a farm tractor as the surprise at a father secreting a tomato plant where a young daughter had planted a stone the night before.
December 27, 2020
I have never been so delighted to see the word shit in a poem, and never so awed by explainations of love and loss
January 9, 2021
Beautiful and rough poems that you should read right now.
April 21, 2021
This is a really beautifully written collection... But nothing really grabbed me.
June 3, 2021
A great collection of intelligent and thoughtful poems open to any lover of poetry. I think this is the poet's first book and it's a good one.
June 3, 2021
I was listening to the audiobook and I just couldn’t get into it.
February 10, 2022
Hush
My Mother the Astronomer
After Hearing of My Father's Illness
Dirt Song
Touch Comes Through Me
Something Important Put Clumsily Away
My Mother the Astronomer
After Hearing of My Father's Illness
Dirt Song
Touch Comes Through Me
Something Important Put Clumsily Away
May 27, 2022
I'm going to have to revisit how Hall uses line breaks in these.
September 17, 2023
The musicality of Vermont on every page. It’s an ugly-beautiful approach to nature poetry and the harsh reality of survival in rural communities. Read for my Art and Chaos of First Books class.
January 17, 2024
Just not something I related to at all.
May 25, 2024
The music in this is A1
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