Product Description
This edition is a reprint of the 2005 Stride Books paperback edition. Reviews of the 2005 edition:
"The poetry is ripe with sensuality, whether it is kissing or watching birds flutter or polar bears fight."
- Jacqueline Karp, New Hope International Review Online, September 2005.
"She reminded me a lot of the early work of Boris Pasternak where the poet does not so much observe the natural world as fuse with it breaking down the boundaries between speaker and landscape… She also does clever things with sound… [and] has the odd image that manages to be both unusual and just right."
- Belinda Cooke, "Belinda Cooke reviews six new volumes from Stride," Shearsman 63/4, April 2005.
"...a secondary level of suggestiveness on which the overall themes of this collection become clear. This is characteristic of the way in which the best of the poems and sequences in The Glaze from Breaking succeed: the implications of particular images shift and are clarified in time. The first sentence in the book tells us that 'Theories of self can be demolished', and the poems proceed to show subjective language rewriting itself, as where the word 'breaking' in the book’s title comes to inhabit many of its different senses at once..."
- Matthew Sperling, "Matthew Sperling reviews three new collections from Stride," Tower Poetry, June 2005.
"...readers of contemporary poetry – especially those intrigued by the possibilities of the prose-poem form – will find this small yet deeply felt collection well worth seeking out for its elegant exploration of love and loss, recovery and redemption, eroticism and the echoes of the heart."
- Kate Washington, "Beautifully Formed: A Review of Joanne Merriam’s The Glaze From Breaking," chicklit, March 30, 2005.
"Merriam's entire collection uses silence to give her work an eerie feel of helplessness. Silence is a kidnapper of communication, and Merriam suffocates us in the inability to express, as though '[m]outh sealed in nectar, silence lies dormant on my tongue.'... Her images are sharp and vivid..."
- Alicia Higginbotham, "The Glaze From Breaking by Joanne Merriam," Verse, March 5, 2005.
From the Inside Flap
'Merriam uses language to shift the reader's attention... to the surprising and ironic, yes, to something lovely, letting the poem deliver a fresh shock: 'A word for the sound plants must make at the moment they break the soil. See / how your fingers curl tight as fiddleheads and your whole body smells / green. The glaze from breaking.' Merriam's long lines ... can convey not only imagery, but dramatic movement, and ironic emphasis simultaneously.' Philip Miller, Literary Magazine Review
'Memory, tenderness, and its flip side 'estrangement' - these are key themes in Joanne Merriam's exquisite poems. With an accomplished lyric ear and eye, Merriam's images soar through her verses and prose poems like plants flinging their spores. The city is always in the frame yet, out of the window, lies the natural world; a beautifully rendered amphitheatre in which the poet explores personal relationships and the relation in which we stand to the world. Merriam's emotional honesty, combined with her convincing, startling images, will transport you.' Andy Brown
