In Julia Blumenreich’s masterful The What of Underfoot, all are “gathered in a cathedral” of innovation, a passionate meditation on love, loss and renewal of the human, animal, and natural worlds. Her poems aim to protect all that is beloved from suffering, yet are fearlessly honest in exposing what is problematic. No writer of denial, the scale of her striking use of language and unexpected twists reveal her insight, as in “when you rid yourself /of who you thought you were.” Ms. Blumenreich speaks in particulars, lines where a gorge “reaches down to pat the creek’s shoulder when it’s lonely”, and, “the bulb looks at the flower in fear”. These poems’ nuanced perspectives on “this life”, whether personal or universal, offer gifts of awe. Her singular command of form, many of her own creation, also enhances the profound breadth of content. Finally, The What of Underfoot, breathless in its radiant pursuit of the ineffable, respects its own disarming wisdom, spread across each transformative and realized page.
–Alicia Askenase, author of St. Valentine May Have Been Twelve Different Men
The poems of The What of Underfoot are startlingly lyrical:
we follow how their shadows fold up and down back into /
the night (Mute Swan). Clear, marvelous: See how it follows me /
my black dress a ship / In America / I sit in the dark (Granma Hilda
and Joseph Brodsky). Language with extra ginger because she feels like it:
Impotent wings proof it’s a bird / Fat-arse. Melancholic visage. Dodo DNA
rumored at Oxford. / That’s trouble (Lewis Carroll and the Ghost). Julia
Blumenreich’s poems are handbooks, guide books: Ordinary, How, On The
Way To Pastorious Park, Now, Dedication, Small Talk, The Only Harmless
Great Thing, Armchair Travelers’ Checklist, Meditation At Twenty Five,
Lilacs And Other Things. Things are not as simple as they may appear.
These poems know there is suffering; they know there is happiness.
These poems speak for Beauty when it can’t speak for itself.
You have not heard this voice before and I’ll stand on Jorie
Graham’s nice furniture in my Clarks desert boots and say so!
–Leonard Gontarek, author of Take Your Hand Out of My Pocket, Shiva
Julia Blumenreich renders images and utterances like a painter—cardinal’s head beneath the rose bush, fist-sized red tulips, blue-black butterflies edged in cornflower—in rain-soaked brush strokes. We follow her through corridors & fields, intimate sorrows & loves, guided by the tension between capacious sentences & variable lines. You will savor these poems over many re-readings.
–Eli Goldblatt, author of For Instance, Without a Trace, and Speech Acts
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