Reviews

“Pugh wants to gather up and sift through all she can manage just a little ways into the twenty-first century. It’s a mammoth job and she knows it, she treats it with delicate respect and a whole lot of thoughtful arrangement. Nothing is only one thing, anything can be everything. Stardust Media makes for a wild ride and a good one.”

—Dara Wier, Juniper Prize for Poetry judge and author of You Good Thing 

“Christina Pugh’s Stardust Media goes right to the heart of how we live now: What particular human qualities does our technological civilization enliven or deaden inside us? What really astonishes and fortifies the reader are the endlessly inventive ways the poet has found to figure and refigure her own restless vision. Quiet virtuosity, complexly registered thinking-as-feeling—these are her signature qualities as a poet, as original as she is intelligent.”

—Tom Sleigh, author of House of Fact, House of Ruin: Poems  

“The poems in Stardust Media are major works by a major poet. Their virtuoso technique enlivens the reader’s sense of just how complex and rich the world may be, even as the poems strive toward their fundamental, bedrock motive—to preserve and transmit the imprint of the human.”

—Peter Campion, Kenyon Review 

“The late Carl Sagan liked to say that we humans are made of ‘star stuff,’ a corollary that his protégé and successor in the popular imagination, Neal deGrasse Tyson, has reframed as, ‘We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.’ It follows, then, that everything is composed of similar material—plants, animals, humans and their artistic outputs. The poems in Christina Pugh’s newest collection, Stardust Media, should also be included, though not because of their subject matter or cosmological ancestry. Pugh’s daring, deeply layered, and erudite poetry asks readers to take a trip around the universe to understand its lessons in interconnectedness.”

—Jane Rosenberg LaForge, American Book Review

“Virtually every poem in Christina Pugh’s new book, Stardust Media, involves a blending of opposites, two diametrically opposed concepts or images that resolve their differences to form a new and more revelatory understanding of both. This deft sleight-of-hand maneuver provides a challenging but rewarding experience, each poem not so much ‘the drama of redemption,’ as George Herbert would have it, but the drama of renewal. The theme most common—the tension between technology and art—speaks to our twenty-first century with a clarion and reassuring voice.”

—Richard Holinger, Another Chicago Magazine

“If the aural spirits of Kurt Cobain, Graham Parsons, Emmylou Harris, Ian Curtis, Steely Dan, and the Cocteau Twins provide Stardust Media with its haunting soundtrack, then the volume’s plethora of visuals construct for us its endless chain of glowing screens of every size, our handheld devices and laptops with their luminescent wallpaper. Early in the collection, ‘Smartphone Inlet’ presages that trend through a deft comparison of embroidery to texting, reaching back for contrast through history to eras when ‘women / would brood like robins on inchoate / letters pulled airily from cloth,’ but whose ‘words were never / lit from within, the way that ours are.’ Pugh dances back and forth from the clack and chime of a manual typewriter’s carriage in ‘Toll,’ to stolid Ohio barns along the interstate highway (‘Sky-blue / with white roofs. Wait, isn’t sky-blue brighter / than any sky you really see?’), to a meditation on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cinematic masterpiece Blue, to ‘the promiscuity of television,’ naturally, ‘its screen, I mean, since it flickers to anyone.’ And so our present-day technologies are met in Pugh’s poems, ultimately, with a democratizing embrace.”

—Jason Roush, Popsublime