To find a new beauty, poetry collection
Gold Wake Press, 2012
A bestseller on two “hot new release lists” on Amazon (Poetry and General Literature/Poetry)
“Andrea Witzke Slot’s finely crafted first book echoes with the voices of writers past and present. H.D., David Baker, and John Keats are only a few of the poets whose work informs this refreshingly well-read debut...a wonderful debut from a talented poet.” - Kristina Marie Darling. Read the full review at LitPub here.
"Andrea Witzke Slot’s To Find A New Beauty Is rich with cool, intelligent and carefully crafted poems that often have a subtext of terror and darkness. She uses a variety of personae -- including Penelope, Eurydice, Io, the nymph on Keat’s Grecian Urn, a woman who marries her sister’s widower and others -- in land- [and sea-] scapes that are powerful personae too in these poems." -- Marge Piercy, author of The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems 1980-2010; the memoir is Sleeping with Cats; as well the New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It; and Sex Wars.
"In the background of Andrea Witzke Slot’s To find a new beauty glimmers the controlling metaphor of the Biblical garden; in the foreground is the body’s desire, longing that reveals itself in tensions that roil between origin and some possible almost imaginable, end point…This is a volume of poetry, then, celebrating animation, celebrating pilgrimage not so much in its common religious or secular senses, but rather in a qualified archetypal sense; that is, these poems trace the human quest to recover the sacred via the potential transformative powers inherent in human agency." -- John Hoppenthaler, author of Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, and Lives of Water (all with Carnegie Mellon University Press)
"How have you been haunted? To find a new beauty, Andrea Witzke Slot's first book of poems, enumerates the many ways that elegy, witnessing, and the dead haunt the living. With elegies that at once celebrate the dead and long for their touch, To find a new beauty is interested in just that—finding a beauty in the refuse, in what is left, in the hulking remains of grief." -- Roger Reeves, author of King Me and winner of the 2015 Whiting Prize
"Slot’s work stands equal with that of Snyder and Oliver. With bewitching language, she pulls the reader into a gentle current of rolling imagery. Suspended within the flow of these pages, I was carried to a place of calm reflection." -- L.M. Browning, author of Ruminations at Twilight, Oak Wise, and The Barren Plain, winner of Nautilus Gold Medal for Poetry, and Foreword Reviews‘ Book of the Year Award.
academic essays / book publications
Inhabiting "La Patria": Identity, Agency, and "Antojo" in the Work of Julia Alvarez
SUNY Press, 2013 Andrea's essay “'Between the Scylla and the Charybdis': Remapping Subjectivity in the Dialogic Waters of Julia Alvarez’s 'The Other Side/El Otro Lado'” illustrates how the social fabric of dialogic interaction in Alvarez's long poem is driven by the intense subjectivity and structural/contextual power of the poetic form. By circling the power structures of speech and social class structures, Alavarez's poem not only gives voices to those who are without voice but, more importantly, awakens readers to the thought patterns that often invisibly limit ourselves and others. Drawing on theories by Chela Sandoval, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Homi Bhabha, the essay demonstrates Alvarez uses the “in-between” of cultures, classes, and languages to create insurgent emancipatory weaponry in her complex, multi-voiced work. Read through PROJECT MUSE or buy the book -- |
Dialogism and Poetry: Hearing Over
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 Andrea's essay "Dialogic Poetry as Emancipatory Technology: Ventriloquy and Voiceovers in the Rhythmic Junctures of Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge" focuses on the complex movement of subjectivity in Mullen's work through the act of ventriloquy. By demonstrating how this play on voice--as it occupies numerous ideological positions--the essay who's how the poetic form can break down and break through the subtle forms of subjugation that continue to infiltrate social relationships and thought. Read the essay HERE OR buy the book here -- |
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