Review of She Returns to the Floating World in the US Review of Books!
- At May 14, 2012
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
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A nice review appeared today in the US Review of Books in the “Honorable Mentions” for the Eric Hoffer Prize, under Poetry. Thank you to the judges of the Eric Hoffer Prize and to the US Review of Books! I’m so grateful.
http://www.theusreview.com/USRhoffer.html#poetry
She Returns to the Floating World, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Kitsune Books – This collection takes a massive risk, and succeeds. Rather than going along with the decidedly luddite personality of contemporary poetry, Gailey faces mainstream pop culture head-on. Gailey weaves classic themes of transformation, self-knowledge, and natural beauty into a fantastical multi-colored world of fairy tales, animation and video games. Rather than poetry that seeks a quiet, cloistered serenity, outside of pop, this book is full of proudly-penned odes to Godzilla, robots, and animated princesses—the denizens of the contemporary imagination. While this approach could come off as gimmicky, Gailey pulls it off with grace, beauty and skill, proving that poetry can be about more than peonies and nightingales.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
