The Green-go Turn of Telling is a poetic excavation of self, a sifting – archaeological and fine – of the shards of a daughter. Each lyric poem in the collection recovers a piece of the lost, and so a shaping and a making, a recovering of self, are enacted in these pages. There is human wreckage here, but also a rescuing force of female wildness. The final love poems, at first fractured and reluctant, gradually move toward a recognition that “plain…hand-cranked” love can draw the “scorned and lonely self” into restorative human connection.
The elegant wedding of fresh intellect and lyric bravado distinguish Aimée Sands' new poems from much of our recent American poetry. Here is all of the heartbreak and gravity of being human stripped of everything but its essential, luminous core of knowing. We can relish in the way that in poem after poem the poet finds language that is restorative in the face of the crises she evokes. This regard for words said right – that they may save you – is what drives this life, and therefore these poems, and they are lit with all of the advantages of poems that have been cared for and worried over and made as right as they can be, no small accomplishment, for which I for one am grateful. Bruce Weigl
Aimée Sands’ first collection is the work of a mature poet who has refined her craft in the course of years. The complex emotions of childhood versus the seductiveness and terror of the adult sphere with its secret shame and guilt are not so much explored as re-enacted here in language that is both figurative and precise, but also hauntingly oblique and mysterious. Despite her realization that there is little shelter and the edifices we construct do not shield us from our own fears, Sands manages to wrest words from the darkness that illuminate and console, lighting the way to a place where “the pelt of suffering” can be stripped off, where a door will open to receive the self on its tentative search for home. Eva Bourke
