Customer Reviews

New Jersey (Brittingham Prize in Poetry)

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This latest On the Road salvo is a quest to make sense of speed, short attention spans, and the pastiche of bad taste and sheer stupidity and terror that some mistakenly think is the soul of America. Much closer to that complex, diverse and elusive soul is the passion and insight that compels Andrews through her journey of self-discovery and naming. Traveling the same physical and psychic highways as Williams and Pound before her, this new poet makes a compelling and impressive Statement of Arrival in this debut. This is a poet to listen to, to watch.

--Robert McDowell, author of a book on poetry in spiritual practice, which is due out later this year.

Betsy Andrews's book-length poem, "New Jersey," is extremely exciting and thought-provoking. Betsy's passion and use of the English language are truly awe-inspiring. She's one of the country's most brilliant young poets. "New Jersey" is not to be missed by lovers of poetry and the English language.

Winner of the 2007 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, New Jersey is a book-length, free-verse poem that weaves a diverse portrait of America, from its landfills and wetlands to its weapons labs, politics, and human consciousness. Heavily grounded in industrial metaphor, New Jersey is keenly whetted with savage honesty about the death of a thousand cuts inflicted by the demands of technology, war, industry, and pollution. "Turnpike immaculate, the salt marsh flanked in / masks, cupids, urns, plumage, syringes, food wrappers, cigarette butts, / the carved and gilded heraldry of a clean-up crew called Special Removal, / leasing themselves like automobiles registered to a series of dummy corporations / wraparound ballistics the belief in an extraordinary rendition of / the axiom 'let every soul be subject'".