“…a poem of vertiginous self-consciousness: its extremity of feeling countervailed by the pressure of silence it makes felt. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins in ‘No worst, there is none’, this poet brings experience to a pitch in language at once pared back and wild with its play of repeating words and sounds.”
“Investigates the joys and complexities of this evolution, this meld and pull, with verve and a calming intelligence.”
“The Greenhouse is as alive as the title promises. These poems are wildly thoughtful, pensively wild.”
“The voice that guides us through this unknown territory is dependable and a bit confessional, unique, and unstoppable.”
“Until reading Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s The Greenhouse … I didn’t know what a chapbook could do. I’d read plenty of moving chapbooks, sure. But to create, in only twelve poems, an experience as urgent, as real, and as necessary as The Greenhouse is astonishing.”
“These multivocal poems reverberate with questions, asides, daydreams, mathematical calculations…. It is thrilling to follow Stonestreet on this journey, through patience and restlessness, moving from one thought to the next while she goes about the daily chores of looking after a young child. The speaker doesn’t seem dulled by the monotony and sleep deprivation but …
“Throughout this brilliant collection, Stonestreet’s curiosities and honesties are bracing and true, as she chides and nurtures, studies and entreats, meditates, amuses, and sings, even if it’s just ‘one song when all the rest have fled from memory.”
“Stonestreet mixes the playful and the profound, and the result well represents its place in a venerable series.”
“The speaker wildly zags from the human scale to the galactic, riffing on anything that could be considered Other… deliver[ing] surprise after surprise. Tulips, Water, Ash is a book that excels at such surprises, striking fresh sparks of meaning from line to line and, sometimes, word to word.”
“A wonderfully alive, actively thinking attentiveness…. darting this way and that toward meaning, opening our eyes and ears, our minds, to continual change—personal, communal, and cosmic. Keenly aware of the potential ‘heat in the flint, light in the twig,’ she shows us how to see the very flux of life.”
“The rich light in this book—of street fairs, sun through the windshield—might half-blind us if this poet weren’t looking with such close and dark attention. Again and again, memory swims up from childhood, and love disturbs and soothes.”
“It is rare to see a collection, debut or not, that is so impeccably crafted—precise, wonderfully complicated, and rich. This is a book of opportunities: linguistic, syntactic, imagistic. Every bit of detail contributes, in an inevitable way, to the whole.”
“Stonestreet’s empathies of eye, her vision and revisionary glancings, let us undergo radical shifts in scale between the ‘burnished’ and the ‘broken’…. Stonestreet’s imagination is as tender as it is tough-minded.”
“Tulips, Water, Ash risks talking about the things we have no words for. Simultaneously incisive and passionate, these poems take a chillingly fresh look at the world and ‘chew it till it bleeds.’ They offer the insights we desperately need.”
“Radiant attentiveness, rare and gorgeous as it may be, is among the least of Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s gifts. Her real distinction is the uncanny ability to penetrate to the heart of an image: to trace its stern trajectories, to capture and unfold its inborn logic. Vision for Stonestreet involves a rigorous will-to-submit: this is both …