Customer Reviews

Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press Poetry Prize)

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Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room is as playful as it is profound. Kelli Agodon does an artful job of balancing hard-won wisdom and wistfulness throughout her prize-winning collection. The moon returns again and again as do dead poets and very alive lovers. There are too many stellar poems to choose just one or two favorites, but "Questions at Heaven's Gate" is one of the ones I wish I'd written with it's mirrored stanzas of when my father meets God, and the concurrent, when God meets my father. But what I value most in this necessary collection is the poet's movement from Neruda to Oprah, from the Hubble Telescope to baklava. I finish Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room and turn the book over to begin another elegant journey through its pages again. This is a book you'll not only want on your bookshelf, but it's also one to be given to those that you love - be they writer, barista, woman or man.

Rarely do I consider a book of poems a "page turner," but I couldn't put down Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room. I kept wanting to see where this poet would go next, though I really wanted to slow down and savor each poem. I laughed out loud, then grew quiet, then laughed again; here is a poet who can be funny and tragic at the same time. She's been a marvelous companion to me as I dive into my own writing.

I fell in love with the speaker of the poems in Kelli Russell Agodon's wonderful collection, Letters From The Emily Dickinson Room. The voice throughout this intelligent book is witty, compassionate, wry, observant and engaging. Agodon's beautifully structured poems address what it means to age, experience loss, entertain doubt, and search for meaning. I especially enjoyed the poems that use humor and heart to explore a relationship with God.

Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room is a poetry book you can recommend to a wide range of readers. There is so much to enjoy here.

I just received Kelli Russell Agodon's new poetry collection, and while I normally take my time to savor poetry, I found that I could not put this book down. These poems, some of which were written in the Emily Dickinson room of the Sylvia Beach Hotel, are as accessible as they are beautiful. The author's use of language is breathtaking -- she wonders, in the poem "Letter to Vincent van Gogh, Who Loved Silence," whether the artist "...found a way / to lower the volume of moon hanging dead in the sky" -- and she writes on such subjects as love, death, memory in ways both intense as well as light (one of my favorites: "Journal Notes from a Consultation with a Dream Psychic"). I highly recommend this collection for anyone who likes to curl up with poetry -- as well as any reader who is ready to ponder, think, and dream.

Forgetting English: Stories

Since the publication of her debut collection, Small Knots, in 2004, Kelli Russell Agodon has kept us waiting six long years for this new collection. I came across the book last month while browsing through the book tent at the Dodge Poetry Festival. I picked it up, planning to check out a few poems and then, if I liked them, to later order the book from Amazon. But after sampling just a handful of poems, I was hooked, decided I'd waited long enough, and bought the book. I'm glad I did.

One of the many appealing aspects of this collection is Agodon's fanciful interest in the esoteric scientific fact, an interest that is matched by her talent for tenderly rendering human feelings and relationships. With great dexterity, the poet often brings the two together as in this definition of love: "half a heart floating over a speck of dust." Agodon also has a talent for the stunning closing line, e.g., this one from "Year of the Meteor Shower," spoken by a young husband to his new bride as they begin to land after a turbulent flight from Mexico to Seattle: "Too much city, not enough stars."

The smallest thing engages this poet's attention--the fruit fly, flowers, birds--as do the big things--the moon, meteors, and space flight. Running throughout the collection and providing its inner structure is an interest in letters--letters of the alphabet, literary letters, words, mistaken words, missing words, and wordsmiths. Emily Dickinson would be proud to find her name embedded in the title of this collection.

Occasionally I read a poem that I'm so smitten with that I wanted to be the one who wrote it. "I Try to Plagiarize Moonlight," from Kelli Russell Agodon's newest book, Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press Poetry Prize) was such a poem. While I coveted that poem upon reading it, Agodon's wit and word muscle was not lost on this one poem.

Agodon dissects both a pig and depression. She offers survival techniques when you've fallen through the ice, to a lover when they really needed instructions for relationship survival.

She sews poverty to her blouse, found Jesus under her covers, has faith stuck to the "Roof of her house" and it has its own ringtone. This is an indelible manuscript that teeters between life's lessons and life's humor. She takes the Tasmanian devil as a life coach and becomes "the person the room stops for".

In a room full of poetry books, I would recommend Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press Poetry Prize) as one book to stop for.

I read Kelli Russell Agodon's wonderful new collection, LETTERS FROM THE EMILY DICKINSON ROOM, in one sitting, while waiting for a ferry. The drivers around me must have wondered what was making me laugh out loud, then lapse into thoughtful silence.

The voice of these poems is unfailingly soulful, searching and funny -- struggling with the same world I live in, but somehow managing to find the particular details that reveal unexpected beauty, depth or humor that I would have missed. There's a generosity of spirit behind these poems that makes them enormously appealing. Highly recommended!

I've been a fan of Kelli Russell Agodon's poetry since her debut collection Small Knots appeared in 2004, but this book is definitely my favorite. There are poems in this collection that will make you laugh, such as "Coming Up Next: How Killer Blue Irises Spread" and "In the 70s, I Confused Macrame and Macabre," and, "What the Universe Makes of Lingerie" (three of my personal favorites), but the cool thing about Agodon's work is how often pain/sadness and humor/joy appear side by side, just as they do in real life. The poem "Other Words" is a great example of this:

We say dishrag and ribtaker
instead of homemaker.
Use whiplash and lackluster
instead of breadwinner . . .

There are days when sippy cups
become purgatory and family vacation
suggests space mission . . .

I don't want to say fishhook
when I mean marriage, or not-tonight
when what I meant to say is: I can't explain
my sadness or the night has stolen the sky.

It's rare to find a poet with such a keen ear for the vernacular. Before Agodon sat down to write this book, she carefully took America's pulse; she "gets" what it means to be a mother/wife/daughter/writer in a consumer-driven, spiritually-anemic culture. With refreshing honesty, the speaker confesses, in "Quiet Collapse in the Dharma Shop": "I charged spirituality / on my VISA" and "what might improve my mood is / a new bra and some bravery. I believe her when she says "I pray to anything these days--/the plants without names, the beetles, / my garden of hissing snakes," and I am buffeted by her news that

We were not born with wings
Like fireflies, we've had to invent what holds us
up.

Agodon is by turns versatile, ambidextrous, inventive, grave, and funny as all get out in this stunning collection. If you like reading poems that encompass not only what's going on down the street but also way past Pluto, this is a book for you.