Flemish

By Caroline Knox

• Description
• Reviews

• Caroline Knox’s eighth collection is a web of wholly original madhattery. Strange, inquisitive, formally experimental—Flemish showcases the agility that comes from a lifetime of serious language play and the skill of a master craftsperson. Utilizing spoken vernaculars, technical language, and referential prose, Knox is writing at the top of her game, and reading her is a pleasure not to be missed.

• Knox dresses her speakers and her cacophony of subjects (sister, otters, Dickinson, Mary Wesley) in whatever clothes history hands them (or she conjures up), letting them act out their roles on a spindle of wordplay and pathos.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  By turns funny, esoteric, and absurdist, Flemish is also positively enthralling, an energetic paean to language, the object, and the history of language and of objects.
  Seth Abramson, Huffington Post
  
  Caroline Knox can imagine that any passing idiom or aesthetic ideal might, some day, be put to good use...[she] explores the staying power of our capacity for exuberance...
  Jo Ann Clark, Boston Review
  
  Sometimes you’re not quite sure which mode the poet is in, or even on what continent she might be musing, but such is the challenge of reading the work of a technically skilled wordsmith such as Knox.
  South Coast Today
  
  It may be facile to say that Knox helps us see it is possible to write about anything—but then again, maybe this is far from overly simplistic. In allowing us any detail, Knox is cutting away at the contrary forces around the act of writing—the ones which throw invention in the opposite direction, to hesitations and to writer's blocks.
  Alexandria Peary, Literary Imagination