Given

By Arielle Greenberg

• Description
• Reviews

• “New consciousnesses shine here in delicate, angry, ecstatic, funny, heartbroken play: the forked lightning of true poetry.”—Jean Valentine
  
  Arielle Greenberg's debut collection rises to the occasion, at once bold and tender, experimental and clear.

• In Given, Arielle Greenberg makes dazzling explorations into the secrets embedded in language. Greenberg deals with words as strange objects that offer obscure meanings which might explain life, but she is no simple “experimental” writer--rather, she remembers that what poetry does best is produce complex meaning in the never-ending possibilities language affords.
  Rain Taxi
  
  The book represents a dance toward, and away from, pivotal experiences of loss and grim triumph, in the course of which a host of symbols, conventions, and themes are invoked, playfully subverted, and resurrected in a form more personal to the author. Dolls accompany murderers on their missions. A tornado demolishes a Dairy Queen and picks up sweetness. Shifting names, shapes “I am this burning building with five creases” and emotional registers, Greenberg’s narrator strives for a universal identification with the poetic tradition, symbols of childhood fractured in the flux of sexual awakening, and, ultimately, her own experiences.
  Chad Parmenter, Pleiades