Poetry. "Andrea Witzke Slot's TO FIND A NEW BEAUTY is rich with cool, intelligent and carefully crafted poems that often have a subtext of terror and darkness. She uses a variety of personae—Penelope, Eurydice, Io, the nymph on Keats's Grecian urn, a woman who marries her sister's widower and others—in land- [and sea-] scapes that are powerful personae too in these poems."— Marge Piercy
"In the background of Andrea Witzke Slot's TO FIND A NEW BEAUTY glimmers the controlling metaphor of the Biblical garden; in the foreground is the body's desire, longing that reveals itself in tensions that roil between origin and some possible, almost imaginable, end point.... The speaker's restless eye keeps catching upon images from the landscape that suggest to her what alternative garden might still be created by human hands. What lay between Alpha and Omega are transience, uncertainty and shifting tides. This is a volume of poetry, then, celebrating animation, celebrating pilgrimage not so much in its common religious or secular senses, but rather in a qualified archetypal sense; that is, these poems trace the human quest to recover the sacred via the potential transformative powers inherent in human agency."— John Hoppenthaler
"How have you been haunted? TO FIND A NEW BEAUTY, Andrea Witzke Slot's first book of poems enumerates the many ways that elegy, witnessing, and the dead haunt the living. With elegies that at once celebrate the dead and long for their touch, TO FIND A NEW BEAUTY is interested in just that—finding a beauty in the refuse, in what is left, in the hulking remains of grief. Quite simply, the moan of the dead haunts the reader. Through an intense intimacy, Slot's poems touch the reader 'like a ghost whose white dress whispers over the sheets of your bed.' Be prepared to be touched."—Roger Reeves
"Slot's work stands equal with that of Snyder and Oliver. With bewitching language, she pulls the reader into a gentle current of rolling imagery. Suspended within the flow of these pages, I was carried to a place of calm reflection."— L. M. Browning
"In the background of Andrea Witzke Slot's TO FIND A NEW BEAUTY glimmers the controlling metaphor of the Biblical garden; in the foreground is the body's desire, longing that reveals itself in tensions that roil between origin and some possible, almost imaginable, end point.... The speaker's restless eye keeps catching upon images from the landscape that suggest to her what alternative garden might still be created by human hands. What lay between Alpha and Omega are transience, uncertainty and shifting tides. This is a volume of poetry, then, celebrating animation, celebrating pilgrimage not so much in its common religious or secular senses, but rather in a qualified archetypal sense; that is, these poems trace the human quest to recover the sacred via the potential transformative powers inherent in human agency."— John Hoppenthaler
"How have you been haunted? TO FIND A NEW BEAUTY, Andrea Witzke Slot's first book of poems enumerates the many ways that elegy, witnessing, and the dead haunt the living. With elegies that at once celebrate the dead and long for their touch, TO FIND A NEW BEAUTY is interested in just that—finding a beauty in the refuse, in what is left, in the hulking remains of grief. Quite simply, the moan of the dead haunts the reader. Through an intense intimacy, Slot's poems touch the reader 'like a ghost whose white dress whispers over the sheets of your bed.' Be prepared to be touched."—Roger Reeves
"Slot's work stands equal with that of Snyder and Oliver. With bewitching language, she pulls the reader into a gentle current of rolling imagery. Suspended within the flow of these pages, I was carried to a place of calm reflection."— L. M. Browning
