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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A New Voice, December 14, 2001
This review is from: Lot of My Sister (Wick Poetry Chapbook Series, Ser. 2, No. 10) (Paperback)
I was surprised to find a gem in this slim, inexpensive volume of poetry. "Lot of my Sister" signals the arrival of a fine new poetic voice. Her poems are startling and bold, covering the emotional landscape, from love to the pain of a physical disability. Her words will speak especially to women as there are explorations into the lives of the women behind Houdini and the painter Rembrandt. Her images are breathtaking and real, yet the poems read quickly and stay with you. What's even more surprising is that such powerful truths can come from someone so young,(much like Sylvia Plath or early Louise Gluck) and I look forward to seeing what else will come from her pen in the future. Buy this book. It will be worth a great deal someday.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best chapbooks I've read for a while, October 17, 2004
This review is from: Lot of My Sister (Wick Poetry Chapbook Series, Ser. 2, No. 10) (Paperback)
These are surprising and rich poems. I love the Wick Poetry Program for their continued interest in and support of the chapbook form, and this is one of their best in recent years. As editor of a fairly prominent literary magazine several years back, I got all their chapbooks in the mail for possible review. Stine's work stood out from the rest, and is maybe the only one that I stole from the office before leaving. The work has confessional overtones, but the craft is what really sparkles. Sensuous and pathological (in an good way) at times, this is good stuff.
Of course her newer poems--uncollected here--are even better, but you'll have to wait on those for the full-length book that we all know will be coming out eventually.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Quiet Book for a Moment of Respite, January 25, 2002
This review is from: Lot of My Sister (Wick Poetry Chapbook Series, Ser. 2, No. 10) (Paperback)
I remember "little treasure chest" books from my childhood. The very name of the series conjured up the delights one might find inside. The covers were shiny and new and smooth and were a metaphor for the gift of reading. The size indicated that it would not take long to find the jewels within. Alison Stine's "Lot Of My Sister" is much the same sort of book. A slender chapbook, it is clothed in a cover that is a delight to touch and not so brilliantly colored that one will expect exlosions within its covers. This is a book of poetry, after all, and one comes to it expecting a different kind of experience. By any standard, this is a lovely book of poetry but it most touching when Stine describes the special sounds of being deaf. When she touches on this aspect of her own life, the poems become close and personal. As she says, they "come back to me as music." Consider this: From "Fields Beyond Fields:" "...one hand memorized the closed mouths of lockers..." This slim volume is also full of moments when we share other bits of humanity with the author:
"...the swallow of our morning cups." and the image of a cancer survivor:
"eyelashes like tea leaves
in her morning cup?" "Lot Of My Sister" is a little books that offers twenty-five pages for twenty-five moments of respite--moments that anyone can "work in" to their schedule and so enrich their lives.
I could have used twenty-five more delectible pages, twenty-five more memorable moments. Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of "This is the Place"
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