13 July 2020

Stephanie Strickland's collection "How the Universe Is Made"

After a lot of reading, a lot of researching, and a lot of googling, I wrote a review of Stephanie Strickland's How the Universe Is Made: Poems new and selected 1985-2019. The more I learned about the poems, the more impressed I grew with the entire project, which I construe as hyper-feminist. Though Stephanie is also a digital writer/artist, and though she often says that a work that is in book form and electronic form thereby contains both--that is, the one or the other is not the entire work of art--this book is a fantastic stand-alone piece.

In a style that is often witty and always humblingly erudite, Stephanie Strickland pits poetry against the wave patterns of our world. She battles our mental, physical and spiritual incarceration in culture—the “ferocious / self-completing / sentences / exerting control.”

My review, "On Slipping Code," is up at Heavy Feather Review.