Reviews

“In poetry that dazzles with its erudition and cosmopolitan approach, Christina Pugh shows us the role of language in constructing—and eventually deconstructing—the self. ‘In a room made of windows, glass is the skin,’ she tells us. At turns luminous and devastating, the work in this gorgeous volume reveals every facet of the narrator’s lived experience—from inhabiting the physical body to articulating a sophisticated artistic sensibility—as discursive constructs, arising out of a nexus of community and shared experience. ‘[L]ike a flock we all landed at Teresa and the angel,’ she recounts. Yet, at the same time, Pugh interrogates the narrator’s lingering sense of cultural and linguistic otherness, revealing connection with those around her as both contingent and inherently unstable. The voice that emerges from this intersection of philosophy and art, celebration and elegy, is as singular as it is eloquent. ‘I’m thinking everyone must have a fulcrum,’ she writes, ‘The place from which we radiate.’ These are poems that radiate with incredible artistic vision and writerly craft.”

—Editors’ citation, Tupelo Press

“I had thought the mystery of the body and the mystery of faith were different mysteries, and then I read Christina Pugh’s The Right Hand, and learned I’d been thinking wrong. I want to say that this book is two books stitched together by an intelligence of remarkable sensitivity, but it isn’t true.  Rather, the two long poems of which the whole is comprised—‘Into the Skin’ and ‘L’Incontro: The Meeting’—act as stereoscope, bringing the body’s pain and the soul’s ecstasy into their overlapping dimensionality which makes them, finally, real. Skin pierced is the primary principle: the poet’s experience with acupuncture to remedy chronic pain, St. Teresa of Avila (as depicted by Bernini and her own words), pierced by the spear of the angel. In lines needle-sharp, Pugh works toward the radical passivity that might be poetry’s highest achievement—that to the pain one is in, some hand unbidden comes, and relieves it. Call that inspiration or call it intervention, call it Muse or call it medicine, the result is the same: the shattered nerve stitches together again into the possibility of beauty, and these are beautiful poems, true to both body and soul.”

—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk

“In a shimmering phenomenology of body, spirit, and soul, The Right Hand resides at the tender junction of nerve and bone, ‘a nexus: metropolitan.’ In her radiant collection, Christina Pugh’s astute eye illuminates Maya Lin’s lovely river of pins, St. Teresa of Avila with an angel, and wonders such as a ‘sea of porphyry.’ A mystical cartography of the senses, Pugh’s earthbound threshold of the human resonates with our longing for God and the eternal, mapping a basil leaf juxtaposed to a basilica, displaying ‘the flash of a neural jewel,’ or glowing with ‘this notion / of chance in carved marble / unfettering the seam / between watcher / and creator.’”

—Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Beautiful Immunity

“The Right Hand is a circle of a book—but better to use the word ‘loop’ than ‘circle.’ But better still to say The Right Hand is a book of concentric circles, and by saying so loop back around to ‘circle.’ It is a book that grows by listening to itself, and as one reads its final pages one recognizes not only the world it has grown to become, but also the bigness of the world already there in its first pages—by the end, the living flesh that was omnipresent in the book’s first part has become the stony flesh of Saint Teresa as represented by Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and, startlingly, the flesh is even more alive. The Right Hand is, in other words, a living book, and makes more life, and enlarges the life of its reader.”

—Shane McCrae, author of The Many Hundreds of the Scent