Customer Reviews

Given

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As I read this and realized what talent Greenberg has, I couldn't help but wish she'd waited a few years to publish a book. There are glimmers of genuine inventiveness here, but too many of these poems are weighted down by the baggage of a kind of currently hip easy and breezy pseudo-experimental gimmickry. Cutsey little typographic tricks (i.e. crossouts, dashes, slashes and scissor-shaped word-art), studied ironies cleverly juxtaposed against the mock-naive, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. When are the crowd publishing in places like Verse and Volt going to realize that its complacency, not experimentation, when your poems all look and sound exactly the same? Greenberg's good, but she still has to filter her own voice from the fashionable clamor of her influences.

No two poems in this book are alike. Or so it seems to me. Each page, each title, each poem, each line seems itself invented out of its own original pot or on its own original anvil. It's rather a *weird* experience to read Arielle Greenberg's first book -- because I kept wondering, "Like, how does she DO that?!" This book is a masala of influences, voices, and styles, entirely dialogic and curious. There is freshness on each page. What a gift, this GIVEN!

It is no surprise after reading Arielle Greenberg's "Given" that this is the book that put her on the map. She incorporates surrealist imagery, feminist idolatry, and a rejection of narrative voice that makes this book one that demands to be re-read and re-read again and again, (though re-reading might not give you any better of an idea of the "meaning" of most of the poems, if this is what you are looking for. If you are looking for a poet who spells it out for you, gives you some interestingly crafted lines that are clear and leave you with a sense of closure - pick up Chelsea Rathburn. If you are looking for a collection of poetry where you can close your eyes, plug your nose, and jump head first into a twisted rabbit hole of free verse without expecting to ever emerge - pick up "Given."

These poems are daring, playful. Delights to the eye and ear. The variety of form, the voice(s) and play present in each poem makes for a thrilling journey. This collection does not tread lightly and directly as first books so often do. It tears through, it juggles, it incises & surmises the way that children do--without forsaking fun for intellect. I've rarely been so excited by a book. (And it's visually beautiful to boot.)