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For The Right Hand

“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

For Ghosts and the Overplus

“Elegance, restraint, conviction, and a quiet authority have always been the hallmarks of Christina Pugh’s remarkable prose; she brings a delicate intellectual acuity to her essays which is made capacious by her compassionate wisdom. Reading Christina Pugh’s essays I’m always astonished by the subtle yet deeply profound intimacy in her writing. With this collection, Christina Pugh has joined poets David Baker, Robert Hass, and Rosanna Warren as one of the most compelling essayists we have in American poetry. I treasure this book.”

—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

“A spirited, nonconformist book. Christina Pugh has been covering the waterfront of poetry in English for years as poet, critic, teacher, and editor, and her essays rise from those rambles. She reads Dickinson and Bishop against the fashionable grain, plucks at the notion of ‘mainstream poetry,’ and brings us up close to Jonson, Milton, Stevens, Milosz, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ed Roberson, and others in prose both sensuous and precise. A rich adventure of poetic discovery.”

—Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems

“Pugh’s is the freshest, most rigorous voice in contemporary reviewing.”

—Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy

“As Pugh shows, American lyric poets offer dense, elegant, and fierce language to lean into . . . Recommended.”

—Choice

For Stardust Media

“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

For Perception

“Christina Pugh’s Perception transports us, from its opening starburst of phrases, through ravishing particulars: a landscape of shifting perspective and scale, where the soul is a ‘foliate / flame’ and a ‘breadbox.’ Her noun-trains pulse with the kinetic energy of predicates; her unabashed lyricism and genius for discovering resemblance make us see the world anew—in ‘the necklacing of / taillights’ and ‘the sea turtle furrowing / the water as she fans,’ and in the light on a tree trunk shimmering like sherry in a glass.”

—Phillis Levin, author of Mr. Memory

“Each poem in Perception is a strange new invention. In these musically astute, formally assured lines, Christina Pugh makes room for breath, hesitation, and silence. Seductively loosening language from its familiar modes, these poems are less like tightly woven tapestries than they are like fine lace unraveling. Just as important as their visible designs is what we can perceive through them. I already find myself returning often to these beautiful, intricate meditations, grateful for what they release, grateful for what they restore.”

—Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine, winner of the National Book Award

“Pugh’s fourth book contains exquisite short poems devoted to focused observation. Although there is a still-life aspect about what is perceived, including flowers, art, and objects, the poems are alive with movement. White spaces and short lines add to the abbreviated, punctuated, sometimes staccato-like rhythms. But Pugh’s use of associations and metaphors also creates lines of uninterrupted flow. The poems contain highly specific as well as specialized vocabulary that can make what is observed feel almost too magnified or abstract, perhaps like Georgia O'Keefe’s flower paintings. Seven numbered prose sections within the book create timely pauses and provide illumination about the poems and the notion of perception. The ending line of number three seems to summarize Pugh’s aesthetic: ‘Poetry's work is not to ravish, but diminish.’ Through her beautiful approach to minimalism, Pugh offers precise musings on objects while simultaneously offering readers the chance to contemplate the poems themselves, which feel like thoughtful prayers or meditations.”

—Janet St. John, Booklist

For Grains of the Voice

“No poet of her generation can match Christina Pugh’s sheer lyricism. I mean not only her gift for writing precise and beautiful lines and sentences—though the poems in Grains of the Voice are so fine that you could use them to cut glass—but also Pugh’s passionate intelligence, her ability to carve shapes from language that promise to endure, even as they remain open to the unknown and the incomplete, and even as they reveal that vulnerability from which song derives in the first place. T.S. Eliot wrote of the metaphysical poets that they could ‘feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.’ He might as well have been describing the poems in this superb book.”

—Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls

“Christina Pugh is a master of voice, its shades and swayings, and a superb shaper of sound and argument. In Grains of the Voice she shows herself a world-making poet, and presides over her creation with a fine, pressing energy.”

—David Mikics, coauthor of The Art of the Sonnet (with Stephanie Burt)

“Christina Pugh’s a serious poet, very smart, very gifted, & very passionate. Original work.”

—Philip Levine, former U.S. Poet Laureate and author of The Last Shift

“Christina Pugh’s poems in Grains of the Voice are stunning in their complexity and force. . . . This collection is, in essence, an act of singing. Each poem lilts, echoes, trills what has come before so that by the end one feels that the book has sung itself and that you, the reader, are part of its song.”

—Kristin George Bagdanov, Colorado Review

For Restoration

“How gratifying the act of restoration is in this musical, palpably intelligent book: gratifying in the range of what it chooses to ‘restore,’ from dance to dream to Freud’s Dora, and gratifying in the depth of its process. In Pugh’s precise and resonant poems, restoration includes both the acquisition and denial of matter. . . . How are we yoked to the airborne form, Pugh wonders, and it to us?  Restoration is the luminous answer.”

 —Linda Bierds, author of The Hardy Tree

“Christina Pugh’s Restoration is indeed an act of recovery and restoring.  In the midst of all our cultural noise and chaos, this book gives us keen, focused attention. . . replenishes us even with our losses, if we can summon, as Pugh does, the courage simply to respect feeling that is also thought and thought that is feeling.”

—Reginald Gibbons, author of Renditions

“Christina Pugh’s new collection Restoration is a stunning accomplishment. There is a discretion and lyric acuity to these poems, as well as an elegant intelligence, that resolve into startling and freshly earned wisdoms. Each precisely measured phrase reminds us that of all musics, it is the music of the mind that is most satisfying in poetry. Christina Pugh reveals the many ways the realm of dream inhabits and intersects our daily experience, as what in daylight might seem the most natural of observations is exposed as a new beginning in the dark, an unfolding to a greater meditation. Poised, restrained, and supremely confident, this is a truly notable volume of poems.”

—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

“Freud is everywhere in this gorgeous volume of poems: in the twenty-seven species of ‘Dream Work,’ in the extended meditation on Dora, one of the doctor’s most famous patients, and, consummately, in the poems that favor the formal rather than the thematic legacy.  For Freud was, first and foremost, one of the twentieth-century’s great poetic readers; he taught us, anew, the semantic power of form: inversion, omission, metonymy, repetition, all the repositories of meaning. Christina Pugh’s considerable brilliance is to capture these insights for the lyric poem. No other recent work I know exhibits such a gift for simultaneous justness and surprise, for pleasures of the fresh-built analogy.  What’s restored in Restoration is our felt attachment to the world.”

—Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy

“There are truly breathtaking poems in this humanly rich and reflective book—it abounds in microcosms of imagery and words which are scrupulously invested by the poet with a sort of musical perfectionism.  The shifts between one passage and another, one poem and another, are startlingly vivid and enlightening.  A book to read and reread, whose sound-symphonies, language, and rhythms will linger long in my memory.”

—Anne Winters, author of The Displaced of Capital

“"[A]n elegant, intimate, and melodious ‘journey in a circle’ . . . It combines a confessional poet’s personality with a Language poet’s anxiety about the written word, a romantic’s insistence on self with a postmodernist’s sense of fracture, and an imagist’s attention to detail with the metaphorist’s imaginative freedom. In this way, Pugh addresses the aesthetic concerns of her day while also surpassing them.”

—Jennifer Banks, editor at Yale University Press and author of Natality: Toward A Philosophy of Birth

“Don’t let the time stamp (‘September 2001’) at the bottom of the first poem in Christina Pugh’s intelligent, compelling second volume, Restoration, mislead you. Pugh’s book makes no explicit mention of the events of 9/11. Instead, she references that period in much the same way that Virginia Woolf acknowledged ‘December 1910’: namely, as the approximate point at which ‘human character changed.’ Restoration unfolds in the aftermath of such change. Pugh’s sharp psychological investigations mingle pronouns whose referents remain hauntingly unspecified, with uncanny, vivid imagery (‘a stand of iris rises as an island in the grass’), creating a gently surreal, dream-bound, ‘crepuscular’ world. Her speakers (one of whom toys with Wordsworth’s words in the bold ‘I Had No Human Fears’) challenge the concept of personhood: ‘I need // to leave myself: // imagine me / alive, with no sentience.’ Like ‘the doctor’ in the book’s centerpiece—the tremendous twelve-part poem ‘Notes for Dora,’ based on Freud’s famed patient—who ‘pried each noun / from its casing, / so the pearl eardrops trembled free,’ Pugh strips the skin of habit and familiarity from her subjects, transforming each into something luminous and new.”

—Sumita Chakraborty, Boston Review

“If restoration is, according to Nietzsche, an act of revenge, then Christina Pugh in her second book enacts vengeance that seems devoid of fear, primarily because the object of this vengeance remains a mystery, beyond narrative construction. Pugh’s Restoration: Poems defies and resists, as well as exposes, our Pavlovian desires for the explicatory and the voyeuristic. This is a restoration ‘free of the X-ray’s zoom,’ if by X-rays she means the fleshing out of telling. Instead, Pugh’s Restoration sublimates revenge into a language that is the ‘densest vessel’ for one’s words, where one returns to a previous dwelling, over and over, until a lyric, a song, is what remains. . . . The more poems one reads in this book, the more one rereads the poems; the more one embraces the pleasure and wisdom Pugh asks us to engage in. ‘Let’s not ask how it was made– / this swan in a blue window, / swimming in snow. It’s the word beneath / that moves me most.’”

—Fady Joudah, Ploughshares, in “Recommended Books”

For Rotary

“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