Customer Reviews

Underlife (New Voices)

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I am an editor at the literary journal, Crab Creek Review and this book was one of my choices for our Editors' Choice section (where we post our favorite books). This was one of my very favorite books of the year. January's voice and poems are engaging. She writes in a way that brings the reader and in a way that doesn't alienate. Her poems are lovely gems of life and once I started this book, I didn't put it down until I was finished.

Here's my "official" review I did for our magazine:

She is known in the blogworld as PoetMom [..], but January Gill O'Neil is more than just your average blogger, she is the author of the incredible debut collection, Underlife. While the poems in Underlife explore the complexity of daily life, family, and work, they do not sidestep from tougher subjects such as addiction, race, and sex. O'Neil's work is both playful and poignant, narrative and lyrical and her work is a mindful treat for the reader from the first to last page. Highly recommended.

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Yes, I definitely recommend this book. This is a poet we will be hearing a lot more from.

From the mischievously vivid to the maternally tender, January Gill O'Neil's poems are a vital and necessary contribution to contemporary literature. There are few poets writing today who have Ms. O'Neil's range, her wit, her almost painterly attention to detail. From the tenderness of "Tangerines," to the raucous sexiness of "What Mommy Wants," to the startling realism of "Discipline," there are poems in UNDERLIFE which deserve inclusion in any anthology that would attempt to encompass the important poems of our day. There is autobiography, there is family history, there is food and drink. Few poets can veer from a bawdy sense of humor ("Poem about Nuts") to solemn and lethal seriousness with as much dexterity -- and as much grace! -- as January Gill O'Neil. A very fine book with many stellar poems. Highly recommended.