Precarious: New & Selected Poems - Judith Pacht

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nJudith Pacht's powerful new book, Precarious: New & Selected Poems, is a remarkable and wise gathering of the poet's elegant, fiercely arresting reflections. Worldly, historically aware and urgent in their intimacy, these poems are memorable for their deep empathy and visionary clarity. -David St. Johnn nn nThere is tensile, sculptural materiality to the language in Judith Pacht's stunning collection, Precarious: New & Selected Poems, in which lean linguistic precision, a-linear structures and neo-narrative gaps lead the reader again and again into moments of profoundly rich experiential vision. Pacht's poems locate themselves in everyday domestic scenes, but they yearn toward sublimity, exploring how the careful attention we pay to the world can lead us, quite unexpectedly, to something more: not to traditional 'meaning, ' but to art itself. To the shifting, renewing freedoms of our own constructive consciousness. -Dorothy Barresi n nn nIn Precarious, Pacht excavates consciousness and conscience-the intricacies of the self, its early imprints and consequences, the way an older version holds her younger forms. The poet inhabits the multiples. She describes the 'scent of resin and damp earth, musk and bark in the air, ' sensations in the mind of a ten-year-old girl, sharp n n and tender, taking the world in. And that's exactly what the poems in Precarious do: perceive life as it is: complicated, fragile, lavish with beauty. n n -Marsha de la On nn nPrecarious is a distillation of a lifetime in the poetry life, with finely crafted work in complex forms such as beau rime, sestinas and Spanish sonnets. There are poems that read as if they were written from ancient history and poems about the shocks and disappointments of today's news. Welcome to the lyrical, complex world of Judith Pacht. Hang on, it is a ride worth taking. -Richard Garcian