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In Residence
presents us with writing in a new idiom. We have a sense of being present
at the moment when a representative of fresh thinking about writing enters
poetry. Beth Anderson employs a simulteneity in the line, where everything
happens at once and without displacement, with a continuing poetic summation
ingenious and personal. Anderson locates her sensibility within an unusual
placement of distance and intimacy.
from The Royal We:
This new country beholds you from a tumult
of routine
that will not adjust to communal
living. Other people
are always looking for titles, but
I wonder what to say
to avoid praise or reassurance and
yet to speak. Never previously
would conundrum have described
my language...
This need to initiate another method arrives from a subtle reply to the
ritual force which allows for change. Much is going on within the work
of Anderson and none of it is mechanical. The wheels of her mind are turning,
aided by an exceptional ear, to make us grateful for In Residence,
and its sensitized introduction to appearances in the natural and social
world.
--Barbara Guest
Beth Anderson is the author of The Impending Collision (rem•press)
and The Domain of Inquiry (Instress). Her poems have appeared in
Arshile, The Germ, Hanging Loose, and other journals and in An
Anthology of (New) American Poets (Talisman House). She works in Boston
as a lexicographer and is the editor and publisher of reference:press
chapbooks.
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