gloss — news — rebecca hazelton

As mentioned in my last post, I’m going to be posting reviews of Gloss every week to try and make up for, well, basically not doing that at all this last year.

This is from Kristina Marie Darling’s fantastic double review over at the LA Review of Books. She takes a look at my book, Gloss, and Traci Brimhall’s book, Saudade, though the lens of feminism and silence. One of the bests gifts as a writer is to receive a review that really gets you — and Darling does. Plus, by pairing me with Traci, one of my favorite poets, she puts me in great company.

We witness Brimhall and Hazelton inhabiting the familiar couplets, tercets, and quatrains of an inherited artistic tradition, yet creating a provocative reversal of power from within their well-trodden structures. As each book unfolds, the forms which we’ve come to know are made suddenly and wonderfully strange by a careful, intentional, and disruptive withholding of narrative context.

For the full review, go here!

My third book of poetry, Gloss, came out in 2019 and I really didn’t do much to acknowledge it. I’m not great at self-promotion, and like a lot of writers I quickly lose belief in the things I make, quickly moving on to the next project. There’s a little “hedonic treadmill’ operating here as well — once something it published, it’s “done” and I abandon it. If I look at it at all, I see the flaws..

But what’s wrong with being proud of something you worked hard on? Gloss was the product of years of work, of trying to figure out who I was when I didn’t have employment to define me, when I had years of rejection on the academic job market, when I was a new mother and when my body didn’t feel like my own in so many ways. The book came out of a lot of pain and joy and uncertainty .

I never know how to celebrate when I’ve accomplished something, and so often I don’t. But I’m working on that. So this is belated, but I think over the next few weeks I’ll share some reviews of Gloss, both to do a little self-promotion and to thank the people who spent time with my work and found something worthy of consideration.

I’ll start with a little one in a big venue — this one surprised me quite a lot, and yes, I did go buy a paper and look at it when it came out. ;)

The review is small, as “New and Notable” always is, and so I’ll just copy it and include a link to the source

GLOSS By Rebecca Hazelton. (University of Wisconsin, paper, $14.95.) Hazelton’s poems cast a teasing light over the surface sheen of social norms, the playacting in every relationship: “Let’s pretend to be with other people,” one ends, “until we’re with other people.” But beneath their own witty surfaces, the poems also brim with loss and serious moral inquiry.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/books/review/new-poetry.html