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My first book, Lark Apprentice was
published in March 2004
by New
Issues Press.
Buy
Now at Amazon.com
"The gestures in the lyric
poems of Louise Mathias' Lark Apprentice are as swift and elusive
as wings in flight. Always aware of the futility in efforts to settle,
these beautiful poems are coerced into motion, pausing only briefly
to ponder secrets of yearning, of loss, and even of the cosmos itself.
Possessing a bold and dark sensuality, they entice us to follow
their inexplicable paths..." -- Molly Bendall
"To trace the lines of Louise Mathias’s poems in Lark Apprentice is to ride just above the skin of nerve, to slide down a darkly thrilling erotica of trouble, “elliptical / & nervous.” Her lines deliver shocks of the dazzling sort that result in addiction. And they’re everywhere. They abound. The only thing to do is surrender to prowling for them....
This is deeply exciting poetry, as wild and nervy and elusive in its imaginative expanse as it is rigorous and taut in the discipline of its editing, its vigorous honing down to the most essential—and extravagant—final gesture
..." -- Review by Sarah Maclay, Poetry International
"While poets often strive to explain the inexplicable, Mathias also works to turn the weeds of language into exotic bouquets. Such alchemy seems impossible, yet the poet succeeds by fusing content and form in her debut collection... "Undress it," Mathias writes in "Mutilation.""Command it//to walk like a woman(down//on its hands and knees)." The imperative mode and parenthetical statement give these lines their disturbing gravity; The poet's rare power lies in her ability to compress a great deal of emotion (or social critique) into the space of a single line."-- Review by Dan Pinkerton, Shenandoah
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