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Voice-Over
Reviews
San Francisco State University's Poetry Center Book Award
Thom Gunn, Poetry Center Book Award judge:
"Elaine Equi has that individuality that comes from not caring if you are like other people or not. Fastidiously unwasteful, her style is remarkably consistent, and yet can accommodate different kinds of poems—from the assemblages she creates out of Lorine Niedecker's correspondence to the Psychic Readers Network. This is a distinguished and enjoyable book."
Library Journal:
"Equi delights us with another volume of good-humored poems, written in her vivacious style."
Boston Review:
"Ever since Equi made her poetic presence known back in Chicago in the 1980s, 'arrangement' has been a key part of her poetry. An Equi poem steps crisply, solidly, simply, from line to line; but the sequence is anything by simple."
Cleveland Free Times:
"'The poem is a small machine made of God,' this bright, gifted minimalist poet explains in her latest collection. Readers may see commonalities with Chinese T'ang poets, with the great American poet Lorine Niedecker and with, dare I say, William Carlos Williams."
ForeWord Magazine:
"Accessible yet reflective, whimsical yet savvy . . . despite the complexity of these poems, we never feel alienated, but always drawn in close to the experience of her work."
Poetry Project Newsletter:
"The world and the poem are as strange as ever. With Voice-Over Elaine Equi, an heir of Williams and Lorine Niedecker in her spareness and precision, is perfectly positioned to demonstrate this."
XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics:
"The voices in Voice-Over are the voices of temptation . . . Reading these poems feels rather like eating a particularly elegant kind of ice-cream."
Rain Taxi Review of Books:
"Equi writes deftly and with brevity. Her poems are taut and compact, in spite of (and sometimes because of) a meandering within. In most pieces, her fluidity comes to a certain end—wrapped, ribboned, and presented to the reader."
Ann Lauterbach:
"Equi finds in the small things—gestures, moments, objects—a core simplicity, neither pious or reductive, which recovers and redefines an essential American spirit."
Wayne Koestenbaum:
"Clean, clear, cool, quick: Elaine Equi's beautiful epigrams of refusal, entirely contemporary, exist at a blissful remove from the fatiguing. I learn a lot from them about how to live and how to write. I relish her mystic attentiveness to silence, and to the daily uncanny. She is at once an entertainer and an oracle: a winning combination."
Nicholas Christopher:
"Elaine Equi's eclectic new book is her best to date. She calibrates the nuances of voice in these poems until they ring like music, all the while giving us images and tableaux of sharp contrasts and the subtlest colorations. 'The poem is a small machine made of God,' Ms. Equi writes. And in poem after poem Voice-Over unfolds as a wonderful assemblage, carefully constructed, infused with mystery and delight."
Also by this author:
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