Reviews

12"x12" ink, watercolor and gold powder colored acrylic with intaglio etched birds on canvas. For reference, here are my transcribed notes... How do I begin to represent the tender and honest, complete lives sewn together "Yes, it is you love-suspended within this simple moment." Round edges - th...

Every sacred language,’ writes Octavio Paz, ‘is secret. And conversely: every secret language … borders on the sacred.’ In the liminal Pyre, poet Maureen Alsop traverses – and erodes – this secret/sacred border, which is also the border of life and death, ‘the valley between our language’ (‘North...

Maureen Alsop’s 2009 chapbook, the dream and the dream you spoke, suggests that our dreams may be more “real” than our lived experiences. Her latest book, Mirror Inside Coffin, takes this assertion one step further by asking if our experiences, lived or dreamed, are “real”— or merely re...

I met Maureen Alsop before meeting her poetry. We were ghost hunting together in the hills of the Antelope Valley. To clarify, we are not normally ghost hunters, but poets. We were actually in search of poetry—attempting to soften a location of trauma with eulogy. While climbing over the wreckage...

Maureen Alsop contributes a series of poems on divination in the January issue. Today, she talks about the genesis of that work, worries about rhubarb and rain and her preferred method of divination. 1. I notice most poets have a series of poems they like to work with (such as Marie-Elizabeth Ma...

These poems voice a grief akin to “the song tucked into the death that named you,” a pain in the midst of disconnection. Alsop grapples with estrangement, whether internal or external, social or cosmic, intimate or coldly precise. In these poems, we are not only inclined, but also taught to exami...

This is a book of annotations, a bibliography of divination. Like any bibliography, Maureen Alsop’s Mantic is carefully researched and curated. The collection’s title, Mantic, and periodic poems within the collection, are defined by the art of divining and the many ways to do so—“Gyromancy,” “Our...

How do we understand how poetry crosses all the borders in our mind? Maureen Alsop is a gift to our understanding of how broken thought colorizes another thought – phrases that seemingly have nothing to do with one another— come inside the reader to make a whole. It’s a mysterious process and I’m...