Vestigial
[F]ragments my/specialty, writes Page Hill Starzinger in her compelling first book, Vestigial, and, indeed, the title implies the book itself is a remnant. But if Vestigial is fragmentary, (leavinges/and fragmentes... etched and eroded...) it is a flood of fragments. This is a vivid, dynamic, and muscular collection whose poems seem able to sweep everything into themselves--from the etymology of early English to the percentage of homes in Delhi without clean water. Yet the poems are neither anarchic nor hectic. In fact, in counterpoint to their energy, there is a beautiful, almost grave, and measured cadence to this work as Starzinger, like Penelope, weaves and unweaves. As she writes, I keep trying to shape a story. I keep disappearing. Vestigial is a marvelous debut. --Lynn EmanuelVestigial whirls around a powerful magnetic center where particles or vestiges of now-living or lost worlds spin themselves. This poet's imagination is the fiery magnetism that revivifies the word-hoarde through these dazzling etymological flashes ancient and new embodiments of knowledge, science, history in the paradise furnace of poetry. The velocity of the author's insights stuns the reader: we follow, bewitched, into synaptical leaps that seem impossible to sustain, yet are sustained and unstoppable. Vestigial is a virtuoso performance, learned in the extreme, yet also eloquently empathetic. Unfold your hands,/fall a/part; she writes. And we open the page and fall a/part then are re-made, wholly. --Carol Muske-DukesVestigial whirls around a powerful magnetic center where particles or vestiges of now-living or lost worlds spin themselves. This poet's imagination is the fiery magnetism that revivifies the word-hoarde through these dazzling etymological flashes ancient and new embodiments of knowledge, science, history in the paradise furnace of poetry. The velocity of the author's insights stuns the reader: we follow, bewitched, into synaptical leaps that seem impossible to sustain, yet are sustained and unstoppable. Vestigial is a virtuoso performance, learned in the extreme, yet also eloquently empathetic. Unfold your hands,/fall a/part; she writes. And we open the page and fall a/part then are re-made, wholly. --Carol Muske-Dukes