Keynote
Poet Saskia Hamilton, author of As for Dream, explores "where the pull of reverie becomes palpable and eerily seductive"—Poetry
Book Title
Divide These
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “Divide These is superb.”—Poetry
Body
We will get through this.
We might not get through this.
The body changes imperceptibly,
Adjusts to gravity.
—from "The Collapse of the System"
In these spare, evocative poems, Saskia Hamilton maps the spaces between grief and longing, solitude and companionship, urban and pastoral dreamscapes, what is audible and what is visible. Out of these divides, Hamilton registers with provocative statement and echoing lyric what does and doesn't fit into the world and our conceptions of the world. As she asks in the title poem, "And then as each day clears / another away, what's to be counted on?" Must everything be torn in two? Divide These brings delicate subtlety together with riveting assertion to make an original, unsettling music.
We might not get through this.
The body changes imperceptibly,
Adjusts to gravity.
—from "The Collapse of the System"
In these spare, evocative poems, Saskia Hamilton maps the spaces between grief and longing, solitude and companionship, urban and pastoral dreamscapes, what is audible and what is visible. Out of these divides, Hamilton registers with provocative statement and echoing lyric what does and doesn't fit into the world and our conceptions of the world. As she asks in the title poem, "And then as each day clears / another away, what's to be counted on?" Must everything be torn in two? Divide These brings delicate subtlety together with riveting assertion to make an original, unsettling music.
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About the Author
Credit: Jacqueline Mia Foster
Praise
- “Hamilton’s writing has been called spare and delicate, but neither of these quite gets at the effect of her poems, which are delicate only in the way a suspension bridge is: neither is marked by unnecessary ornament or fragility, and it would be a mistake to regard either as anything other than rigorously tough.”—Boston Review
- “Through graceful lines and turns, Saskia Hamilton’s poems jar. Through deft, spare, language they instruct, question, even sing.”—Pleiades
- “In Saskia Hamilton’s As for Dream, spare, miraculously explosive lyrics track a struggle with erotic longing and renunciation and an equally transfixing immersion in family memories. What proves salvational is a wry, spirited self-chiding and a gallant, inspirational call to arms to work. The result: a sequence of supremely evocative poems.”—Alice Quinn, Bookforum
