The Iowa Review Reviews Allison Cobb's Green-Wood

Allison Cobb's Green-Wood (Nightboat, 2010) is reviewed at the Iowa Review this week. "Green-Wood moves outward in concentric circles of exploration, growing exponentially in scope and scale," writes Peter Myers. A further excerpt:

...Yet Green-Wood's inquiry is never untethered from the local or the personal, from either the eponymous cemetery or the embodied subjectivity of the book’s speaker. The associative logic that guides the book’s movements repeatedly pulls us back to the speaker’s own life: more walks in the cemetery, but also struggles with infertility, her Mother’s illness, and research in the New York Public Library’s rare books room. This wedding of the autobiographical and historical foregrounds the fact that knowledge, in Green-Wood, cannot be divorced from context, nor shorn of its contingency.

This underlying tension—between the poet’s aim of communicating information about the world and her awareness of the subjectivity that must mediate it—is enacted in Green-Wood's frequent formal ruptures, moments when its expository sections are broken open as if by force...

Read the full review here.