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Critical Praise for Crazy Love

• Life lived at the fever pitch of awareness and care—intensely present eye and voice, to ripped-out rooms, distant battles, vivid landscapes, succulent soil cupped in the fist and loves unending—Pamela Uschuk moves at eloquent, passionate depth through the glories and pleasures of our haunted days. In language both rich and sturdy, she reminds us it is "never too late for repair" in any realm of being.

  — Naomi Shihab Nye, award-winning poet, novelist, and children's author

• Not just the emotion of love, but the subtle ever-shifting parts of it are in this book. Light and dark change themselves. The words are fresh, nature is everywhere and loved, and deep questions are asked about what this world is, the traffic that passes for the world. The language of Pam Uschuk is fresh and put together in ways unique to her own world. Her generous use of language has made me think about poetry in new and different ways.

  — Linda Hogan, author of Rounding the Human Corners: Poems (2008) and People of the Whale: A Novel (2008)

• Pamela Uschuk's Crazy Love is a radiant new collection by a poet writing at the peak of her powers. These poems are as vast as the universe, large-hearted, wise. We savor the delicate observations, the careful detail, wed to passionate vision. Out hiking, one speaker says she wants to hold her friends in "the blue clarity of this altitude, make them fall / desperately in love with sneezeweed / and coreopsis the color of absinthe, / with the small gray teeth of talus / that clatter like broken crockery " ("Climbing down from Engineer Mountain"). Music and humor ripple through these poems, as does grief for environmental destruction, for poverty and war. As the speaker of "Self Help Manual" proclaims, "I will chew blue glass until it releases / the captive language of stars. / I will . . . learn the clogged pipes / of hatred, of scorn, then / flush them clean." I read these gorgeous poems and feel that Uschuk's words restore us to ourselves, to our senses.

  — Cynthia Hogue, author of The Incognito Body

• When the heart and head are one, nothing is impossible as is evidenced in each of the fine poems that comprise Pamela Uschuk's new Crazy Love, a book that shores up not only her abiding love for nature, but for humanity that binds all, collectively. Pamela has a unique way of seeing and showing us how life in all of its many ways are linked: We go from a fox kneeling above its dead mate struck by a car in New York, to a Black man who's hit and run by a driver in Cape town, South Africa, surrounded by strangers; she is one of them standing there witnessing, not knowing his name, but all the same, he, too, deserves a poem: "Hit And Run." A must read for any lover of poetry.

  — Willie James King, author of The House in the Heart

• "I have read no other poet (and I am speaking of all poetry, in all times) EVER who absorbs the lifeblood of this world through every pore and creates a miracle with each word. For after one word must come the next, and you know in your soul -- keenly, sharply -- what that next word will be. The rhythms are ancient, true, transcendent. Thank you ... and even thanks is not enough."

  — Lorian Hemingway, novelist, memoirist and founder of the Lorian Hemingway Prize in Fiction

Reviews

• Sequoia ReviewSpring 2009

  Even the language and the speaker falls victim to the flux in Pamela Uschuk's new collection, Crazy Love, from Wings Press."I will be the torture rack/that stretches out my own truth," she writes. Her poetry is both wrought by war and tended for its beauty, both bitter with "regret's venom" and exuberant with love. After all, "What is the tender palm without the tough skeleton/forming the back of the hand?" she asks in the poem, "Geometry Lesson." The persistent voice of these poems speaks of the tension of the dance between violence and benevolence, man and woman, nature and humanity, as well as the hesitation after the music has stopped. Here, in Uschuk's world of encounters, nothing is complete, and everything is moving, extending, reaching, growing. Even the buck, the chickadee, the tigrita lily sway in the gust of Uschuk's rhythmical words, and the reader has no choice but to follow suit.

  --Reviewed by Emilia Phillips (2009)

• Rattle: Poetry for the 21st CenturyAug. 20, 2009

  To access this review: http://www.rattle.com/blog/2009/08/crazy-love-by-pamela-uschuk-2/

  A lyricist of high order, Pamela Uschuk's Crazy Love, her fourth full-length collection of award-winning poems, is an essential new collection. Uschuk shifts deftly from the personal to the "public," or from the small personal vantage to the larger socio-political perspective. Having traveled the world widely as a reader and mentor to others, it comes as no surprise that her poetry offers a broad point of view, effectively illustrating contemporary and international political concerns. It is the combination of Uschuk's accessibility, clarity, striking imagery (and surprising turns on many of those images), love of nature, regard for global contemporary matters (and how they impact our personal lives) that make her a poet with widespread appeal.

  The poems in Crazy Love focus often on the natural world for inspiration and metaphor. Uschuk seems to take sensual pleasure in the particulars of each setting, often ascribing a personal connection with them in a wide variety of contexts. Consider "Climbing Down from Engineer Mountain," in which the poet, descending "to the trailhead at 10,000 feet / through meadows of insatiable wildflowers" stops and watches her friends "grow smaller / as they walk ahead." She first imagines herself as an Incan mother leaving her children and hiking down the slope. Then:

  I want to reach out and hold my friends awhile
  in the blue clarity of this altitude, make them fall
  desperately in love with sneezeweed
  and coreopsis the color of absinthe ...
  with my heart
  that breaks at each footstep swallowed
  by wild petals and retreating from the solitude
  of ravens, from rock's passionate thrust
  to the traffic of what passes for the world.
  

  A different kind of connection occurs at home on a frigid morning in "Christmas Dawn" when the poet, the self-described "slight woman in a shivering robe / skidding on frost and memories," spooks a buck in the cheat grass. She writes:

  ... he snorts to walk up for a better look
  or to let me know he's boss.
  

  I will always believe that he wanted to tell me
  something essential about my life, but,
  as usual, I fail to interpret what.
  

  Of course, Uschuk does "interpret" the world--and the various manifestations of love within and for it--in poem after poem. Considered holistically, Crazy Love is an exploration of the theme of love and the inherent difficulty at its center. Or perhaps it is best summarized by the poet herself in the last poem of the first section, "Peeling the Kitchen." It concludes:

  Perhaps, this simple work is poetry, to strip
  chaotic layers revealed the buried patterns
  of our stories, charting love's labyrinth, the way betrayal,
  faith and fear spin us
  in their webs, awful and light.
  

  In the middle sections of the collection, Uschuk's focus expands to allow contemporary personal and political concerns to weave their way in. The final section, however, would seem to bring the collection full circle, as Uschuk explores her relationships, especially with her parents and relatives, and the metaphysical urgency resonates most sharply. The final poem, "Flying Through Thunder," dramatizes the experience "pitching / fragile as a cocoon 20,000 feet above tree line." The poem--and book--conclude with these final eleven lines:

  Now as the plane lunges, engines
  steady above the Continental Divide,
  I regard razor backed ridges
  older than memory, vaster
  than scars. They comfort me
  

  in their lack of pity, their indifference
  to our cares. Perhaps this is
  all I need to know. It is not until
  we begin to fall that we
  learn how sweet the burst
  of ecstasy, then
  release.
  

  Reviewed by Chad Prevost

• "This poet knows what love is; she knows the names of things."

  Rattle: Poetry for the 21st CenturyJuly 25, 2009

  When the head and heart are one, nothing is impossible. Pamela Uschuk's fifth full-length volume of poems does more than allude. Crazy Love skillfully shores up the poet's keen observation of mankind, as well as her understanding of the natural world; she juxtaposes both to forge only one. And the speaker is not merely in dialogue with herself and this world, but is very much aware that the reader is also there, which makes these poems three-dimensional. Whether or not the reader refuses to participate in such subtleties, one cannot help but reach for answers to the fine metaphorical touchstones registered while on this sojourn: "The hemlock loses the tanager,/ a bright streak/ in a whirling gauze of snow./ Where do we go?" the speaker posits early on, in the opening of the first poem, "The Horseman Of The Crass And Vulnerable Word." And in the very next line: "You told me the eye was lost." So, she becomes "the eye." She knows someone has to see in order to save us where blind spots cause us to blunder, to commit atrocities, pogroms.

  In "With Its Toll Of Char," the reader gets to observe a fox kneeling above its mate, struck by a car in New York, where the speaker says: "This fox is real./ It's dangerous you say,/ to swerve/ for animals caught on the ice." Later, in the last stanza: "The fox might have started sooner/ from my on-coming car, but he stood/ taking her scent a last time/ that common night/ none of us could any longer take for granted." One finds in the expediency of the language and crisp clarity of the tropes in "The Horseman Of The Crass And Vulnerable Word" that these are not mere nature poems, but poems that engage the reader on a personal level. One finds, when closely examining these, that there isn't anything that is not nature. As soon as one begins to see and to understand his relationship to the natural world, he will find that his own life depends on everything else about him on this planet, no less than Native Americans knew all along.

  In the last three lines of the penultimate stanza of "Hit And Run," the speaker engages us: "In the book of politics, poverty/ is the last sin to die." That kind of "poverty" is observed in the last stanza of the same poem where the speaker says: "Who notices one more nameless death/ these days. He was someones son./ At the scene, no police,/ no culprit, just the beginning of rictus./ Whoever hit the young man is long gone/ inside a cowards shoulder/ turning away." The poet is not only showing how our reckless behavior causes pain, but how contempt that is directed toward one creature might be easily redirected to another. Music ripples here as well as grief for the destruction of the environment, grief for poverty, and grief for war and the many ways in which it is encountered.

  In the third section of the book we find "We Thought No One Could See Us," one of several poems that is a condemnation of the invasion of Iraq. The speaker alludes to our national blindness in the lines: "The illusion we've loved that/ we're alone and secret in the woods, instead/ of backed up like a trunk full of contraband/ to a dull suburban development,/ begins to unravel as we tilt away from sun." And, "Look at these hands, purpled by May's final/ winter slap, wrinkled as rice paper, chilled/ from eating cottage cheese and wine/ that knifes through branches like a rapist/ through lace" are the opening lines of "Fighting the Cold." This poet knows what love is; she knows the names of things. Hers is a voice we can trust. The "eye," once thought lost, is roving every which way. Not even the speaker is spared.

  These fine poems help to make it clear how a country can invade another (no less than our invasion of Iraq), why one race might claim superiority over another, why there is a road in New York where one lone fox must be still searching for its mate. No! I would not call Pamela Uschuk's new book "Crazy Love" at all, but the kind of love that could save us, if we would only listen.

  —————

  Reviewed by Willie James King (Montgomery, AL). He has poems in Alehouse, Mudfish, Orbis: An International Quarterly of Poetry and Prose, RATTLE, and many other journals.

• Traveler's passionate poems connect on multiple levels

  Winston-Salem JournalApril 19, 2009

  Reviewed by Bob Shar

  In her latest poetry collection, Pamela Uschuk, a former director of the Center for Women Writers at Salem College, proves—among other things—that you can take the poet out of Winston-Salem, but you can't take Winston-Salem out of the poet. Not if the poet is as tuned in, big-hearted and intelligent as Uschuk. She's a widely traveled author of four previous collections and numerous chapbooks who is teaching writing and editing and residing in Colorado. And she seems capable of finding poetic inspiration just about anywhere.

  As I review Crazy Love for the Journal, the temptation to focus unduly on the handful of poems set in Winston-Salem is strong. The Winston-Salem poems—"Laundry List on the Back of a Maple Leaf," "Nothing But Southern," "North Carolina Ghost Country" and "Cherry Blossoms on Salem Avenue"—are certainly admirable for their passion, flashes of humor, heart and resonance. Though local readers might get an extra bang out of recognizing local figures and buildings, these poems offer far more. Like the other 40 that make up the collection, they resonate beyond local, regional and national boundaries.

  "Cherry Blossoms on Salem Avenue," for instance, draws the reader in with a description of blossoms wind-driven across Salem Avenue into the path of a homeless, schizophrenic military veteran. It's strength, though, is this dagger of a final stanza:

  Does the Vet whose wounds no longer matter to the sky,
  smell the cinnamon of the pink carnation
  he once pinned to the peach-chested girl
  he asked to the Prom, now the soccer mom
  and NASCAR wife with kids of her own
  who revs past in a Lexus, silver
  as cold Yankee rain, silver
  as a land mine cover,
  a metal skull plate?
  

  Crazy Love is, to a large degree, a collection about connectivity, invisible bonds between haves and have-nots, allies and enemies, friends and lovers, man and nature, past and present, darkness and light, specific spots on a map and the greater world beyond.

  "We Thought No One Could See Us," a personal favorite, moves seamlessly from the falsely assumed secrecy of the speaker's backyard in suburbia, to the streets of Fallujah, and back.

  "Climbing Down From Engineer Mountain," set in Colorado, manages, with its closing line, to pose unstated and unsettling questions about the nature of the workaday world, or, as the speaker puts it, "the traffic of what passes for the world."

  Passion, intellect, stunning imagery, lush language and a laser-sharp sense of purpose drive this collection through an assortment of subjects including—but not limited to—love in various mutations, nature, global warming, politics, war, race relations, family relations, grief, salvatio and poetry itself.

  "Peeling the Kitchen" begins with a married couple removing layers upon layers of wallpaper from their kitchen walls and ceiling. It ends with this stanza:

  Perhaps, this simple work is poetry, to strip
  chaotic layers revealing the buried patterns
  of our stories, charting
  love's labyrinth, the way betrayal,
  faith and fear spin us
  In their webs, awful and light.
  

  Crazy Love does all that and more. Its release during National Poetry Month is cause for celebration in Winston-Salem and the world beyond.

  ————

  Bob Shar is a writer who lives in Winston-Salem.

• Maria Espinosa on Uschuk's Crazy Love

  Gently Read Literature -- www.gentlyread.wordpressFall 2009

  http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/ample-substance-maria-espinosa-on-pamela-uschuks-crazy-love/

  Pamela Uschuk is the author of four volumes of poetry as well as numerous chapbooks, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages. She has been featured at international conferences, has spent years traveling, and has taught creative writing to Native American students on reservations in the west. She is currently a professor of Creative Writing at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.

  Her poems in this 84-page collection are dense and richly textured. The work has an improvisational quality. She may leap from a single image to contemplations far removed, winding through a trajectory of vivid memories, and reflections. Everything is grist for the millmaterial that other writers might put into diaries, memoirs, or novels may be compressed into a few lines or a poem.

  Nature in its many forms permeates her consciousness, from a single flower, a tomato plant, a trapped bird, to mountains, sky, ocean. This love of nature mingles with love of husband, family, and friends. In "Saving the Cormorant on Albermarle Sound" she writes:

  Numb and saturated by spray, it is now
  I love you most, love your thick purple wrist
  Straining to hold the bird above hungry waves,
  Love the deft gentleness of your swollen hand
  That cuts brutal knots without wounding the bird
  Who stares at you resolute as its barbed restraint
  When finally, through the last styrene twist,
  You fling the huge bird free ...
  We are stunned&.as we paddle back to shore
  Above the condemned rows of sea bass and all
  Those snared in darkness well never see.

  Social and political concerns run throughout her work, as in "Sunday News on the Navajo Rez:"

  Stopped at a gas station outside Gallup ...
  and a white pickup pulls up.
  The woman my age, wrapped in a red Pendleton coat ...
  Oh you hear something about what happened up in Colorado
  We trade what we know about the monster avalanche
  That closed Highway 40 ...
  We dont have much time for news here
  What with the baby goats and lambs ...
  her fingers
  tapped out the names of her daughters, especially the last
  ready to head with her company
  to a desert, far across the unknown globe, where villagers
  also raise goats and avalanches take the form
  of a roadside waiting to explode.

  "Flying Through Thunder" presents the overwhelming awareness of nature as at once a reality larger, more durable than human emotions, and at the same time tender, ephemeral as a flower. It progresses through images that stir thoughts and memories, shifting back and forth from the storm through which her plane is actually flying.

  the small turbo prop pitches toward glacial peaks ...
  I remember the way my stomach dropped as a child pumping my swing higher ...
  my brother dared me to jump
  Bombs away. Were hit. Jump. Jump ...
  How could I&.foresee
  that in a few years my brother would be
  drafted to paratrooper school
  to ruin his young knees
  when he landed just off the training mark
  preparing for Vietnam?
  When the army found out he attended rallies, preached peace. He
  was shipped to Da Nang, to dousings
  with Agent Orange
  to the burning of village peoples, to daily mortar attacks
  and sniper fire he still fights ...
  Now as the plane lunges, engines
  steady above the Continental Divide.
  I regard razor backed ridges
  older than memory
  vaster than scars. They comfort me
  in their lack of pity ...

  She is able to condense entire life stories into a few lines, as in "Bell Note" written in memory of her father.

  Sometimes, Dad, there is no loneliness like an ad for the superbowl
  all those coaches blunders youd cuss out
  or the lies of politicians on TV
  smiling as they staggered like possums
  on the sides of reasons highway
  [...] Remember driving cross-country year
  after year from Michigan to Colorado ...
  What did you say to Mom, who sat
  knitting or reading in the back seat, when
  she'd startle like a rock dove, head
  jerking up at us with her shriek
  "We're going the wrong way!
  That field's on fire. It's heading
  right for us!" Maybe her delusions knew that
  the fire was always heading for us, her heart,
  that youd always keep her from the flames.

  With their multiple images and swift traversals of thought, her poems provide ample substance for reflection. They are best savored when read slowly, preferably several times, in order to absorb their full impact.

  ___________ Maria Espinosa is a novelist, poet, and translator. She has also has taught Creative Writing and English as a Second Language. She has published four novels, two chapbooks of poetry, and a critically acclaimed translation of George Sands novel, Lélia. Her novel, Longing, received an American Book Award. Dying Unfinished, her most recent novel, just published by Wings Press, deals with the characters in Longing from a different perspective.

• Wild nature meets raw energy in poetry book

  Durango HeraldApril 7, 2009

  Review by Gregory Moore

  Words, of course, are the building blocks of poetry. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a more adept, more gifted or more memorable architect than Pamela Uschuk.

  In Crazy Love, a collection of new poems that comes after her Pulitzer-nominated Scattered Risks (2005), Uschuk gives people who savor the written word plenty of reasons to read--and keep reading.

  Once her imagery--bursting with both wild nature and raw energy--pulls you into her poetry, the depth of emotion and striking juxtapositions she weaves into her work make it nearly impossible to return to the worldview you harbored before you opened the book. Uschuk is that good.

  But if you are not a regular reader of poetry, Crazy Love gives you another reason to start. Uschuk is a local (now). Her talents for writing and teaching have taken her around the world, but she lives in the Four Corners with her husband, William Pitt Root, and is part of the faculty at Fort Lewis College.

  "Climbing Down from Engineer Mountain," a powerful, elegant chronicle of exhilaration turning to heartbreak at the end of one of Durango's most popular local climbs, deserves to be read on its own merits. But if you know the route up Engineer and its attendant contrasts of wildflowers and stripped stone, the poem will strike a deep chord in your heart, one familiar, but strikingly new at the same time:

  I want to reach out and hold my friends awhile
  in the deep blue clarity of this altitude, make them fall
  desperately in love with sneezeweed
  and coreopsis the color of absinthe, with the small gray teeth of talus
  that clatter like broken crockery/displaced by elk above treeline ...

  That local connection is then highlighted, but at the same time turned on its head on the next page. In "Sunday News on the Navajo Rez," a chance meeting with a woman at a gas station near Gallup opens a window on nearby New Mexico, but the view reveals an unexpected world. It's a world where Uschuk's concerns, despite her life of travel and the fact she is politically astute, seem almost trite compared with those of this woman fully occupied in the season of newborn goats and lambs:

  I can see this woman lift each baby goat
  in the cradle of her large arms and hold
  it to the spot where her fingers
  tapped out the names of her daughters, especially the last ready to head out with her company
  to a desert far across the unknown globe, where villagers
  also raise goats and avalanches take the form
  of a roadside waiting to explode.

  It's those surprises, plentiful from the book's first page to the last, that make this journey with Uschuk so worthwhile. And the last poem, "Flying Through Thunder," ensures the surprises will continue to echo in your memory long after the 102-page volume is tucked onto a shelf. Denver and Durango are not mentioned by name, but it's obvious to any local air commuter that the plane trip that comprises the surface subject of this poem is our own dreaded "Vomit Comet" ride home via small turboprop.

  Thanks to Uschuk, a trip so rough "even the stocky steward wipes sweat / from his forehead, groans as if he's giving birth ..." turns from terror to epiphany. It's a masterful testimony to the power of language to jump generations, and distill the most disparate connections into a vivid experience shared by poet and reader alike. One that, like so many poems in Crazy Love, will invite repeated reading.

  _____________ Gregory Moore is a Durango poet.