FDU MFA Alum Heather Lang Reviews Patty Paine’s “Notes on Mirrors, Already Lost” at Zeteo

Alum Heather Lang reviews Patty Paine’s “Notes on Mirrors, Already Lost” from Paine’s most recent collection, Grief & Other Animals (Accents Publishing, 2015), at Zeteo.

Lang writes:

Yes, there is intense sorrow throughout the piece, but there is also a sort of comfort or even a peacefulness within the lines. And, rather than canceling out or muting one another, this polarity co-exists and fills this seventeen-line poem to the point of brimming.

Among other elements and aspects, this reviewer explores the phonetic symbolism of the opening lines:

Surely there is pain within the poem’s opening lines, but there’s also something comforting in the containment, the embrace, that these small vowels provide as if to, ever so subtly, suggest that everything is manageable, somehow all right.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Intrigued? Read more at Zeteo.

Heather Lang’s poetry has been published by or is forthcoming in Pleiades, december, Mead, Jelly Bucket, The Normal School online, among other publications. She serves as an Associate Poetry Editor and the Online Managing Editor for The Literary Review, as Co-Editor for Petite Hound Press, and as an adjunct professor. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her chapbook manuscript was named a semifinalist in the 2014 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook competition, her poetry has been twice nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and she will serve as an AWP16 moderator/panelist.