Hen & God

Book excerpt: Poetry. Women's Studies. Tearing into our ugliness to find beauty, tearing open the known to find mystery, the new and muscular voice of poet Amber West exposes our contemporary madness and looks for the cure. West's first book HEN & GOD explores the world where poetry is God, where God's cock crows lightning, and the poem itself declares, I am God and my ears / are the wings of the world. The scope of suffering that West addresses will take the reader's breath away, but her linguistic skill makes this an exhilarating rather than a depressing experience. Again and again she reminds us that consciousness--art--is larger than suffering, is our redemption. In persona poems from a dizzying array of characters, West's collection becomes a portrait of life in America now, unflinching and loving and bold. Themes of gender, poverty, and family enrich the collection but by no means sum up the depth of its contents. Amber West offers so many pleasures here: wise-ass speeches by the gods, feminist animal fables, pirate sonnets, and blues songs for the gorgeously gone-wrong. This poet hears Las Vegas speaking with the voice of a gangster-drunk craving water; she hears the sounds little boys don't make when their moms' boyfriends lock them out of the house; she's captured the theatrical rage of Black Friday crowds that can crush a man. Whip-smart, angry, and tender by turns, West's poems aren't afraid to call on some of the oldest traditions in English verse to electrify the dramas of 21st century urban life. --V. Penelope Pelizzon The many voices in HEN & GOD sound out the broken-down reality that is these United States of America. West traces histories of America's misery across coasts and cultures towards a resistant present and future joy. --Modesto Jimenez