9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Szporluk creates gorgeous alternate realities, March 26, 2000
This review is from: Isolato (Iowa Poetry Prize) (Paperback)
I fell in love with Larissa Szporluk's first book, "Dark Sky Question" and I had been anxiously awaiting "Isolato". It was definitely worth the wait. This book is even more complexly gorgeous than the last. I find more to love and get lost in with every reading of her poems. She manages to create a fully real alternate reality with her words -- A reality of jagged breaths, dizzying heights and a spirtuality that's hard to define -- part torture, part rapture. Larissa Szporluk's poetry is wholly unearthly. I've never encountered anything like it before and it is therefore hard to describe. If you haven't read "Dark Sky Question" you may want to read that first to get a feel for the way she writes. If you loved "Dark Sky Question" then definitely get "Isolato".
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fresh and Original Voice, July 10, 2002
This review is from: Isolato (Iowa Poetry Prize) (Paperback)
I enjoyed this book greatly. Unlike most of the books I've read lately by younger poets (so hip and ironic and so fresh from their MFA programs), Szporluk manages to be clever without being pretentious and to write moving poems without being sentimental and ridiculous. I found this book a breath of fresh air.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Delicious., August 6, 2010
This review is from: Isolato (Iowa Poetry Prize) (Paperback)
Larissa Szporluk, Isolato (University of Iowa Press, 2000)
I'm not quite sure what to say about Isolato, Larissa Szporluk's sexy, scary, not-quite-perfect-but-still-much-better-than-anything-you've-ever-chatted-up-in-a-bar second book. I mean, she writes a soliloquy from a meteor. Who does that sort of thing? Larissa Szporluk, that's who, and she does it better than you could ever expect it to have any right to be. She writes poems about the seven seas on the lunar surface (that are, of course, not about the lunar surface at all). And about Jack and the Beanstalk, a modern version, and about prehistoric horses. And compresses it all into one volume that all still manages to have some sort of thematic unity. How does that work? I'm still not quite sure, but it does.
None of this, of course, would mean a thing of Szporluk weren't turning out quality poetry. But she is, or this would be a very different review.
"The plants have gone to witchcraft,
floripondium, owl-tongue, cananga.
She scatters the ribs, the wind, the roads,
increasing her means of isolation.
What cuts across the night for coitus
storms her without warning,
pinning her down. It's the washing
away of her heart on another morning,
the residual body's lost content,
that seeps into the hills like poison...."
("Mare Imbrium")
And if the book has a flaw, and I stress this is a minor quibble at best (and I probably wouldn't be bringing it up at all were I not reviewing it in tandem with George Bilgere's Haywire (q.v.), which is that perfect book), it's the predictability that comes seeping in during the last four lines of that excerpt above. I wouldn't say it makes this poem, or this book, any less of a pleasure to read, but the power of Szporluk's craft is such that it makes me want to be shocked every now and again. Still, this is easily one of the best books I've read so far this year, it's a shoo-in for my Ten Best Reads of the Year list come January 1, and you should absolutely, without question, immediately hunt it down and read it, because this is what great poetry is. **** ½
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