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A
Handmade Museum
Reviews
Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award Winner
Lyn Hejinian, judge’s statement for the Norma Farber First Book Award:
“For her remarkable A Handmade Museum, the poet-phenomenologist Brenda Coultas performs the role of curator, searching out and then presenting a display of places—a display of forms that time takes. In this sense, the publisher’s characterization of the poems as ‘sculptures’ is apt; this is indeed a book of occurrences. As such, it is also a book of encounters. Though the project—and Coultas’s work is markedly project-oriented—has an archeological quality, the results are sudden, immediate, and oddly revelatory. The processes reveal poignant formations whose tranquility remains unaffected by any discovery of them.
There are literary precedents for A Handmade Museum; one could point to the writings of Thoreau, the Wordsworths (Dorothy as well as William), Robert Smithson, Bernadette Mayer, and Juliana Spahr, for example. But, in fact, this is an utterly unusual book—it is ‘a first book’ in a profound, originating sense. As poet-phenomenologist, public-broad-caster, nocturnal-haymaker, Brenda Coultas finds the world strewn with love objects; that they can also be termed debris means only that what time has of the world to offer is limitless. We should follow Coultas and keep track of it.”
Publishers Weekly:
“In these five sets of poems, Coultas unearths an entire America.”
Andrew Ervin, Westchester Journal News:
“A Handmade Museum . . . topped a terrific list of books for me in 2003. Coultas’ terrific hybrid collection includes the stunning ‘Bowery Project,’ a sort of socio-archeological investigation of the famous street, and far too many marvelous poems to enumerate.”
Octopus:
“Brenda Coultas’ debut is a dense, thrilling book that makes actual, lived-in reality feel like imagination’s most necessary ground . . . In many ways, this is an old-fashioned book; it is an intelligent, artful response to the difficulties and riches of trying to make a life.”
Constant Critic:
“Coultas’ poetry has a level acceptance, reminiscent of Lorine Niedecker and C.D. Wright (in a good mood), that lets her consider things . . . with an abandon leavened with deep, though never explicit, conviction.”
Poetry Project Newsletter:
“In A Handmade Museum, the writing invents a universe of experience centered around the Bowery in New York City and, in some pieces, a Midwestern territory of farms, barns, roads and suburban malls, dirt holes, graves, a kitchen table. . . . A Handmade Museum’s sense of what constitutes a story reminds me of Alice Notley and Lydia Davis, or in another sense, Kathy Acker, even Kafka.”
Duluth Ripsaw News:
“Provocative and captivating . . . [Coultas’s] collection is exactly what she intended—a museum, deeply personal and invitingly public.”
American Book Review:
“Ethics and aesthetics affect our attitude toward and our relationship to the myriad objects that clutter our homes and sidewalks, dumpsters and dumps, and Coultas’s poems prompt us to ask: How is value assigned and by whom?”
Rain Taxi Review of Books:
“In the cityscape of A Handmade Museum, endlessly mediated by the impulse to catalogue, the real boundaries of a text are proposed as immeasurably wide.”
Rattapallax:
“A Handmade Museum explores [Coultas’s] obsession with the past with unerring honesty, passion and true sadness. In her hands, sadness becomes art. Later poems are set in rural, southern Indiana where she was raised, and her last poem, ‘A Summer Newsreel’ is a beautiful evocation of childhood and looking back.”
NewPages:
“The poet’s embracing populist sympathies remind me of Carl Sandburg’s work, and her gist for laying out and parsing the language of landscape serves her well here.”
Cosmik:
“The haunting element that emanates from each page in A Handmade Museum is that of a glowering vacancy; from deep Bowery gutters to the gutted hull of Rust Belt prosperity, author Brenda Coultas digs at the hollow places of her landscapes.”
Bernadette Mayer:
“When the wind blows keep Brenda Coultas’s book by your side.”
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