AUGUST 2023 - AudioFile
Some listeners, even those familiar with contemporary poetry, may have trouble following the poems in Ann Lauterbach's collection. They deliberately explode the connections between cause and effect, text and meaning. In doing so, they intentionally depart from prosaic syntax. The author's phrasing does reflect each poem's arrangement on the page, but that arrangement is also unconventional so that even with repeated hearings--and these poems do deserve repeated hearings--some of the sense may be lost without a printed text for reference. Those familiar with Lauterbach's work, however, will find her rough timbre and overall performance gripping. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
01/23/2023
In this vivid 11th collection (after Spell), Lauterbach’s careful diction ranges from plain speech to densely packed sound collages. “I wish to be clear,” she writes, but “I object/ to the literal.” Elsewhere, she claims “words are like small magnets,/ pulling other words toward them.” The eponymous door recurs throughout: “Tenuous, the wire or thread, or single line/ drawn across, edge to edge,// or down to the wedge between/ frame and floor, like a slip of moonlight.” Lauterbach brilliantly demonstrates how words have mutable meanings, as when a “slip” (a garment to be worn) is reframed as an exit: “The southern sky has turned peachy./ I would like to wear it out tomorrow/ as a slip. And so slip/ through a hole in the sky.” As well, the poet portrays consciousness as “filmic,” full of appearances and disappearances, and tinged by an underlying sadness: “I/ went through hoping to greet you/ on the dark side.” These perceptive entries offer a captivating reflection on the range of inner landscapes and the powers of language. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Ann Lauterbach and Door:
“Lauterbach’s poems can be witty and urbane; they can be poignant and impassioned. But whatever the poems do, whatever form they discover to articulate anew and for the first time—since the true surprise of language is how it continues to astonish us—the poems are, again and ever, an act of the mind testing the integrity—structural, moral—of the world.” —Richard Deming, Poetry
“Lauterbach's poems define and inhabit a space that is both mental and physical, made of all manner of stuff, from memories of childhood to what happens when you don't know where the words will take you . . . the language is sinuous and dazzling.” —John Yau, Hyperallergic
“No poet is more attuned to small shifts in perception, to the ‘beautiful differences’ that make and unmake sense in time.” —Ben Lerner
“[Door] encapsulates a wonderful line of [Lauterbach's] from a past interview: ‘In order to endure the loss, and not to let it utterly overwhelm you and utterly take you away from the life, you have to find some way to let it be the thing that animates your attachment to things, and the animated attachment is the present. It’s molecular—it’s just a piece of the life’ . . . She later writes: ‘Let’s explore what words cannot.’ This book does just that, masterfully.” —The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry: Winter 2023”
“Lauterbach is a poet for whom daily life teems with open-ended enigmas, wonderful and terrible mysteries which even the most exquisitely crafted poetic language (which Lauterbach fashions) can only suggest indirectly. Yet her poems do considerably more than simply insinuate life’s unanswerable questions. With stunning emotional force and intellectual power, Lauterbach compels us to question our everyday assumptions about what is most beautiful and true in our lives . . . Door encourages us to think more flexibly and sensitively about the exotic curiosities that circulate beneath the prosaic.” —Arts Fuse
“In this vivid 11th collection, Lauterbach’s careful diction ranges from plain speech to densely packed sound collages . . . Lauterbach brilliantly demonstrates how words have mutable meanings . . . These perceptive entries offer a captivating reflection on the range of inner landscapes and the powers of language.” —Publishers Weekly
“Another way of saying is another way of seeing. With its inimitable, porous syntax, this tremendously beautiful book delivers a new, caring gaze on what is torn and difficult and left ajar.” —Valeria Luiselli
“This is a collection I’ve been needing to have as company and guide in this time, the honest, accurate intelligence all too aware of its helplessness. The title sequence is written in or as eschaton, the ancient word for an extreme, of place, of degree, of time; it is that quality in this poem that makes the extremity of the edge I feel myself on, and all of us on, legible and human.” —Dan Beachy-Quick
Library Journal
04/01/2023
"Let's explore what words cannot" proclaims National Book Award finalist Lauterbach (Or To Begin Again) in her 17th volume of poetry, as she continues to make a scramble out of readers' desire to make sense of the world as reflected in her richly reflective verse. As always, her poems are linguistically intricate, here exploring the idea of a door as an entrance, as an exit, as a midpoint at which to reside: "There is nothing behind the door; there is only/ door, a condition, a prospect, a/ perception" she says in a cool, provocative analysis of human experience. In her long poem "Nights in the Asyntactical World," she makes liberal use of kenning, a compound expression from the Old English and Old Norse, where two or three words might substitute for another whole (for example, ring bearer might substitute for king). At the center of these poems is language itself, the best tool for understanding yet slippery and out of reach: "Words don't care about your or the/ news. Words are indifferent to how you are feeling about/ your feelings…. Words congregate among themselves." VERDICT Challenging reading for those who don't know her work, but a welcome volume for those who do.—Karla Huston
AUGUST 2023 - AudioFile
Some listeners, even those familiar with contemporary poetry, may have trouble following the poems in Ann Lauterbach's collection. They deliberately explode the connections between cause and effect, text and meaning. In doing so, they intentionally depart from prosaic syntax. The author's phrasing does reflect each poem's arrangement on the page, but that arrangement is also unconventional so that even with repeated hearings--and these poems do deserve repeated hearings--some of the sense may be lost without a printed text for reference. Those familiar with Lauterbach's work, however, will find her rough timbre and overall performance gripping. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
