About the Author

The author of six previous books of poetry, including National Book Award finalist Hinge & Sign (Wesleyan, 1993), Heather McHugh teaches in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and since 1984 at the University of Washington in Seattle. She takes time off in Maine.

Reviews

"This is a sort of poignancy possible only through the striking together of profound sadness with tough humor... McHugh's rigorous experiments with language give these poems the feel of tightly coiled springs in their precision and energy."--Jessica Garratt, Austin Chronicle

"... McHugh here returns to her own signature bravura and obsessive word play, focusing on the struggle of eye and mind, brain and body, to mediate the exacting details of an exquisitely overwrought world... probing language in a way that enhances (and seems inextricably linked to) scientific inquiry..."--Publishers Weekly

"All of her lines are demanding, especially her last lines-puzzling yet provocative, they're like little switches that flip at the end, sending the reader back into the poet's maze of words."--The New York Times Book Review

"This is a sort of poignancy possible only through the striking together of profound sadness with tough humor McHugh's rigorous experiments with language give these poems the feel of tightly coiled springs in their precision and energy."--Jessica Garratt, Austin Chronicle

"Her writing is so alert to itself, so alert to language, it's like watching a dancer on a mirrored floor, stepping on her steps. She's practically playing with her words as she writes them down."--Robert Hass, Washington Post Book World

"This is a sort of poignancy possible only through the striking together of profound sadness with tough humor... McHugh's rigorous experiments with language give these poems the feel of tightly coiled springs in their precision and energy."--Jessica Garratt, Austin Chronicle

"... McHugh here returns to her own signature bravura and obsessive word play, focusing on the struggle of eye and mind, brain and body, to mediate the exacting details of an exquisitely overwrought world... probing language in a way that enhances (and seems inextricably linked to) scientific inquiry..."--Publishers Weekly

"All of her lines are demanding, especially her last lines-puzzling yet provocative, they're like little switches that flip at the end, sending the reader back into the poet's maze of words."--The New York Times Book Review

"This is a sort of poignancy possible only through the striking together of profound sadness with tough humor McHugh's rigorous experiments with language give these poems the feel of tightly coiled springs in their precision and energy."--Jessica Garratt, Austin Chronicle

"Her writing is so alert to itself, so alert to language, it's like watching a dancer on a mirrored floor, stepping on her steps. She's practically playing with her words as she writes them down."--Robert Hass, Washington Post Book World

Invented words, surrealistic imagery, sexual innuendoes, quirky free associations of sound and sense sometimes suggesting profound truths: these are the hallmarks of McHugh's poetry. In her seventh book, McHugh (a National Book Award finalist for Hinge & Sign) writes mostly about dogs, sex, night, death, and fireworks, creating a frenetic energy by breaking rules of syntax. She finds words within a word: "My one/ and only: money/ minus one." She puts similar-sounding words together, "grandma thinks of love-and gets/ amen, a mensch, a mention." She makes nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, and otherwise mines verbal ambiguities-the title poem being a good example. Like the German poet Paul Celan (1920-70), whose work she has translated, McHugh writes in a kind of Rorschach inkblot style. But unlike Celan, whose poems come from the unutterable pain of the German death camps, McHugh writes from her middle-class American upbringing. With a few exceptions, McHugh's poems tend to fall under the weight of their own inventiveness. Recommended for academic libraries.-Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.