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Little Hill
Award-winning poet explores new formal terrain in seven long poems against the violence of the present political moment.
"[Warren] has begun writing longer poems, putting her stamp on a running notational mode whose other practitioners include Stephanie Young, Anselm Berrigan, and Jacqueline Waters. I think you can hear the durational projects, the self-conscious day-scores, of Bernadette Mayer and of Lewis Warsh farther back in the tradition."--Brian Blanchfield, pen.org
The third full-length collection from Bay Area poet Alli Warren, Little Hill comprises seven long poems written with propulsive prosody in a daybook fashion, examining our present, politically charged moment. These poems are at once energetic and contemplative, intimate and direct, as Warren focuses her attention on capitalism, gender, love, inequality, and resistance. Despite the dystopian now, Warren finds promise in the smallest human instances of tenderness, ecological connection, and political solidarity. Little Hill is about learning to live and love in the 21st century while not shying away from all there is to struggle against.
Praise for Little Hill
"In Little Hill Alli Warren's principle method is articulation of exquisite units of speech (thought) that, maintaining separation, are capable of connection. The line might be a sentence or a part of one ... I mean a delicious sense of grammatical distinctness is maintained. The poet, also a lone unit, seems to exist less in relation than as that lone one, condemning this hard world with its villain work and elusive hierarchies. The language is precise, lush, unexpected and often thrilling. Articulation would seem to be the true other, or maybe nature is. The book is gift more than condemnation, though as the latter it's unsparing. Still, it's a gift."--Alice Notley, author of For the Ride and Benediction
"The number of gasps and everything else gets lost in the concentration of Little Hill. Alli Warren keeps company with those rare poets whose every new book is their best. 'This is an old machine with a pulley / It makes music work, ' Warren writes, reworking the ancient technology of poetry to a shine! Dear Poet, thank you for the wow WOW wowing!"--CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
"Reading Alli Warren's Little Hill, I find it incredible that amidst the relentless circulation of capital and commodities--and despite attempts to make all life yield to the logics of extraction, work, accumulation, and the entrepreneurial self--a remainder is created, that of poetry. Little Hill embodies a poetics of radical uncertainty, one that attends to its horrific condition of possibility and is produced through the unmooring catastrophes that define our present moment: the destruction of the earth, mass imprisonment, late-capitalism--the litany does not end there. 'I saw the death of the earth in a child's toy, ' she writes. Everywhere the speaker looks there is 'congealed shit, sometimes on sale.' Yet yearning, even as it is raised tentatively, is not crushed. In and against it all, a question is raised--the question of what it means to love in times of terror."--Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism
"[Warren] has begun writing longer poems, putting her stamp on a running notational mode whose other practitioners include Stephanie Young, Anselm Berrigan, and Jacqueline Waters. I think you can hear the durational projects, the self-conscious day-scores, of Bernadette Mayer and of Lewis Warsh farther back in the tradition."--Brian Blanchfield, pen.org
The third full-length collection from Bay Area poet Alli Warren, Little Hill comprises seven long poems written with propulsive prosody in a daybook fashion, examining our present, politically charged moment. These poems are at once energetic and contemplative, intimate and direct, as Warren focuses her attention on capitalism, gender, love, inequality, and resistance. Despite the dystopian now, Warren finds promise in the smallest human instances of tenderness, ecological connection, and political solidarity. Little Hill is about learning to live and love in the 21st century while not shying away from all there is to struggle against.
Praise for Little Hill
"In Little Hill Alli Warren's principle method is articulation of exquisite units of speech (thought) that, maintaining separation, are capable of connection. The line might be a sentence or a part of one ... I mean a delicious sense of grammatical distinctness is maintained. The poet, also a lone unit, seems to exist less in relation than as that lone one, condemning this hard world with its villain work and elusive hierarchies. The language is precise, lush, unexpected and often thrilling. Articulation would seem to be the true other, or maybe nature is. The book is gift more than condemnation, though as the latter it's unsparing. Still, it's a gift."--Alice Notley, author of For the Ride and Benediction
"The number of gasps and everything else gets lost in the concentration of Little Hill. Alli Warren keeps company with those rare poets whose every new book is their best. 'This is an old machine with a pulley / It makes music work, ' Warren writes, reworking the ancient technology of poetry to a shine! Dear Poet, thank you for the wow WOW wowing!"--CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
"Reading Alli Warren's Little Hill, I find it incredible that amidst the relentless circulation of capital and commodities--and despite attempts to make all life yield to the logics of extraction, work, accumulation, and the entrepreneurial self--a remainder is created, that of poetry. Little Hill embodies a poetics of radical uncertainty, one that attends to its horrific condition of possibility and is produced through the unmooring catastrophes that define our present moment: the destruction of the earth, mass imprisonment, late-capitalism--the litany does not end there. 'I saw the death of the earth in a child's toy, ' she writes. Everywhere the speaker looks there is 'congealed shit, sometimes on sale.' Yet yearning, even as it is raised tentatively, is not crushed. In and against it all, a question is raised--the question of what it means to love in times of terror."--Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism
- GenresPoetry
124 pages, Paperback
First published March 24, 2020
43 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 9, 2020
this small little book of poetry is a big deal. alli warren perfectly instills in her poetry what’s going on out there in these 7 political poems about uncertainty in the 21st century: capitalism, injustice, resistance, gender, & equality.
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July 16, 2025"I study the past to denaturalize the present" (11)
"The both/and meadow-- beautiful and bleeding" (14)
"Happy New Year, Total Loss" (17)
"I'm nostalgic for what I've not seen in the world" (18)
"I found myself sleeping on one of its portions/ Strolling around like a subject/ Speaking about a who as though it were a what/ Where the streets are paved with oranges" (28)
"The biopolitical arc of the universe trends toward Fitbit" (35)
"Chelsea boot with a Crossfit booty/ The condo kills the neighborhood in two months flat" (37)
"Having never learned moderation/ I want to keep the time that bougainvillea keeps" (45)
"I say hi to myself/ In the mirror/ Or is that not a mirror?/ The air is full and you are not here/ I put my hand through the oak" (47)
"I follow the sunlight around the lawn/ With a ridiculous gr"een plastic chair/ A chair has its task and performs it well/ What is mine, listening?/ I didn't make a sound until I was 2 1/2 / I have to work harder because I am dumb/ With cause to wade into water/ I'll take that shimmering/ Over all the gold/ Standards made by men" (49)
"I am naive/ In the ruthless world/ Among the goats/ I try to predict your mood and fail/ Having moved through so many moons" (57)
"People say the light is different in California but I've been/ here all my life" (69)
"For every private matter/ There is a failure of the collective" (118)
"I guess I was driven through that tree/ But I don't remember it" (124)
"The both/and meadow-- beautiful and bleeding" (14)
"Happy New Year, Total Loss" (17)
"I'm nostalgic for what I've not seen in the world" (18)
"I found myself sleeping on one of its portions/ Strolling around like a subject/ Speaking about a who as though it were a what/ Where the streets are paved with oranges" (28)
"The biopolitical arc of the universe trends toward Fitbit" (35)
"Chelsea boot with a Crossfit booty/ The condo kills the neighborhood in two months flat" (37)
"Having never learned moderation/ I want to keep the time that bougainvillea keeps" (45)
"I say hi to myself/ In the mirror/ Or is that not a mirror?/ The air is full and you are not here/ I put my hand through the oak" (47)
"I follow the sunlight around the lawn/ With a ridiculous gr"een plastic chair/ A chair has its task and performs it well/ What is mine, listening?/ I didn't make a sound until I was 2 1/2 / I have to work harder because I am dumb/ With cause to wade into water/ I'll take that shimmering/ Over all the gold/ Standards made by men" (49)
"I am naive/ In the ruthless world/ Among the goats/ I try to predict your mood and fail/ Having moved through so many moons" (57)
"People say the light is different in California but I've been/ here all my life" (69)
"For every private matter/ There is a failure of the collective" (118)
"I guess I was driven through that tree/ But I don't remember it" (124)
December 14, 2020
I still don't think I'm fully equipped to "rate" a book of poetry; I'm not fully educated in the art form and don't have a ton of pre-reading. But I read *this,* and I know that I came away with a sense of sharing this atomized, alienating and demeaning world that Warren writes of, one that still shares the possibility of beauty and meaning. This reinforced the nature of our scattershot world, where realities collide and intersect and contradiction becomes the baseline expectation, and I resonate strongly with this. I'm sure I'm missing so much in my reading of it, so I intend to do it again one day, to see what else I can glean from this.
March 15, 2021
“They call it a cost-of-living raise/Maybe now I can afford to enroll in survival school”
July 28, 2021
an incredible bit of furious and beautiful poetry about our world and its decay and it’s beautiful possibilities for care and tenderness in the midst of the muck
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews