Critical Commentary
Praise for How You Walk Alone in the Dark.
“This book is a love-worn, half-feral gift full of surprise and metaphor. We are where we live and how we live, and these poems are the necessary synthesis to see clearly. She’s asking who we are and what we do with “the heartache we inherit/ born here east of Eden,” and in poems clear-eyed and sharply sentimental she answers: “skin your rabbit at sunrise/and carry his death on your back like childhood."
—Gillian Wigmore, author of Night Watch, Glory, Grayling, Dirt of Ages, Soft Geography, and Orient
“How does anyone survive / the hunger of someone else,” Erin Block asks in her debut poetry collection, and her answer, the poems themselves, are an assertion of that survival, that deep craving for life amidst unrelenting, inevitable loss. With the lens of both hermit and hunter, Block writes tight up against the rawness of the world. These poems are elegant and elemental, with a sinewy lyricism. Block’s poems are illuminating, fresh, deft, compassionate. How You Walk Alone in the Dark is one of the most moving poetry collections I have read in years.”
—Corrie Williamson, author of The River Where You Forgot My Name and Sweet Husk
