Critical Commentary
Praise for A Godless Ascends, “Like the screech owl, Trish Hopkinson’s work hardens itself in order to keep its insides soft. There’s a Plathian urgency to these poems, reminding us that memory has taste buds, ancestry is complicated and life, like poetry, is grounded in physicality.” — Wendy Videlock, author of Wise to the West
Praise for Footnote, “She holds a handful of earth— / she must say it to understand it.” This scene, from a poem that engages Rainer Maria Rilke as well as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, is a gorgeously emblematic and enigmatic moment in Trish Hopkinson’s Footnote. This collection is obsessed with the miracle of words and the mouths that say them, the bodies that carry them out and back in, deliciously, deliriously. From Emily Dickinson to Amiri Baraka to David Lynch to Sylvia Plath to Pablo Neruda to Janis Joplin, these poems perform erasures, palimpsests, collages, ventriloquisms, haunted monologues, dreams in which the physical dances with the metaphysical so that the stormy dream of language can enter us. And then we see how “we are driven by our own ceremonies, / by whirling words.” Hopkinson understands that the best conversation is a transformation, in which the words one has inherited are reinvented. Footnote reminds us that the act of saying is something we may never fully understand—and that is cause for whirling joy.” —Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
“Uprooted,” 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize Finalist selected by Judge Mariano Zaro: “This poem, articulated in perfectly paced tercets, is an exercise of specificity: ‘My mother pulled out the rhubarb.’ This simple action, intensified throughout the poem, becomes a symbol of the relationship between humankind and nature. Without leaving the confined space of this ‘vegetable garden’ the reader witnesses determination, persistence, creativity (‘When the garden grows poison, make pie’), surrender (‘The rhubarb still grows, unharvested’). — Mariano Zaro
- Dayna Patterson’s “Review of Almost Famous by Trish Hopkinson” in Tinderbox Poetry Journal
- Karen Craigo’s review of “Almost Famous by Trish Hopkinson” in Better View of the Moon
- Risa Denenberg’s review of “Reconstructed Happiness, a Microchap by Trish Hopkinson
& a Shout-out to the Origami Poems Project”on The Poetry Café - Eileen Murphy’s “Review: Footnote, by Trish Hopkinson” in Tinderbox Poetry Journal
- Deborah Hauser’s “Book Review: Footnote, by Trish Hopkinson” in Stirring
