Reviews

“If it is true that a good poem defines an emotion not found in any dictionary, then Christina Pugh is an astute lexicographer of the heart.”

—Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and author of Musical Tables

“In this gorgeous collection, Christina Pugh’s musical intelligence, her painterly eye, her elegant ferocity, take on the world as if to show it to the reader for the first time. . . . There is a tough-minded delicacy that tells me Pugh’s poems will be speaking with us for a very long time.”

—Gail Mazur, author of Land’s End: New and Selected Poems

“The reader of Christina Pugh’s poetry enters a realm of change, mystery, and beauty. Objects metamorphose—flowers, paintings, a forgotten dress—melding into the unfamiliar while remaining, or becoming, luminous versions of what they already are. Language is the agent of these transformations, and language, and the ways we use and are used by it, is the subject of many of these poems. In them and through them, we experience a poet’s wonder at words; we accompany her in her process of discovery and creation where worlds unfurl into images which transmute into landscapes we can inhabit.”

—Bruce Bennett, author of Just Another Day in Just Our Town

“The sinuous music of Christina Pugh’s Rotary is the sound of sense fleshing itself out, thought making its presence felt. She’s a poet of fine discernments and wild surmises, lucidly tracking the ambit of language to ‘the tip of the known world, all its limits / shimmering.’ Her poems speak of cities lost and found, the secret histories of flowers and paintings, essential gestures and certain slants of light—touchstones one and all for a fluent lyricism that earns its keep by way of a supple feel for measure, a lapidary aptitude for the luminous particular, and a nervy intimacy with the uncanny. This is that rare first book that knows its own mind, persuading us that alertness can be one of the higher forms of artfulness.”

—David Barber, poetry editor of The Atlantic and author of Secret History

“It seems as if an author, especially a female one, can’t make a debut these days without having some reviewer call it ‘luminous,’ but Christina Pugh’s debut collection, Rotary, truly merits the distinction. . . . Rotary proves Pugh to be a gifted lyricist, an adept dealer in the currency of language and line. Overall, this is a luminous debut that leaves the reader longing, eagerly awaiting her second offering.”

—Kathleen Rooney, Provincetown Arts