Astrid Lorange Reviews New Books by Diana Hamilton and Trisha Low

For Sydney Review of Books, Astrid Lorange reviews new books by Diana Hamilton and Trisha Low, God Was Right and Socialist Realism, respectively. "I am interested most of all in reading Hamilton and Low for their investigation of what poetry can do with sentences and paragraphs, and how poetry can be understood less as a form that writing might take and more as a mode of reading writing’s forms," writes Lorange. More:

Both Hamilton and Low are poets: they publish as poets, write criticism as poets, read as poets. Hamilton’s book was published by Ugly Duckling Presse as a book of poems (the back cover metadata simply says POETRY). And yet, it is a collection of poems that are also other kinds of texts: four self-identify as essays, one is a memo, one a note, one an autobiography, one a letter. Low’s book, on the other hand, was published by Emily Books, an imprint of Coffee House Press, and is marketed as a book of ‘essays’ – a ‘book-length essay’, to be exact. And yet, it reads as much as a book-length prose poem as it does an essay; it has more in common, for example, with Brandon Brown’s Four Seasons or Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely or, as it happens, Diana Hamilton’s God Was Right than it does Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.

Knowing these two authors – knowing their work up to and including these books and knowing them personally, too – I am particularly interested in how these different publishing circumstances might shift a reader’s orientation to poetry as a practice (in the case of Hamilton) and the poet as a figure (in the case of Low). If Hamilton’s poems moonlight as other kinds of texts, then in Socialist Realism, Low herself moonlights as a different kind of author. In both cases, the relation between poetry and not-poetry is a central dynamic. But rather than simply pointing to this relation – and thereby making a simple, albeit useful, comment on genre and the soft, contingent boundaries that are made and unmade by convention, expectation, and transgression – these two books do something more compelling. They suggest that all writing can be read in the manner that one reads a poem, that is, with an acute sensitivity to the processes through which meaning is configured in a particular textual event... 

Read on at Sydney Review of Books.