Praise for BIE!

From Leonora Smith, author of Spatial Relations:

Melissa Dey Hasbrook’s poetry comes from her strong, relentless voice—a voice that rises not from the throat but from deep inside the body—from the solar plexus and the womb. Mad, damn mad, and sometimes wonderfully sassy: “I’d like to see Donald Trump make a toilet bowl shine,” she says: that’s what it means to be “unskilled labor.”

It’s no accident that the first poem in Hasbrook’s Blame it on Eve! opens with an epigraph from poet/feminist/political activist Susan Griffin. There are notes from other street corners in this book: call and response to the Beats’ harangues, to the slam scene’s tough percussions, to the protests of the working man and woman, and to all the never-back-down feminist poets who used their voices to name injustices and keep naming them until men and other women were forced to listen.

Hasbrook’s kind of “edgy” poem is honed like the edge of a blade to slice through crap, to stand off wife beaters, and to dismantle fences at the borders before Bush has time to put them up. It’s clear why she invokes Griffin, whose poem, “I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman,” ends with the lines “there is always a time/for retribution/and that time/is beginning.”

Hasbrook’s voice hits this and other notes, but her poetry is not the work of yesterday; it is the poetry of now. Like some other poets of her generation, Hasbrook is using her poetry as a way of imaging and making a space in this “post-emancipation proclamation nation” where the words poet/feminist/activist don’t need backslashes. And this is where you find the sweetness in this book: generosity, gratitude—running strong and deep beneath the surfaces—hope that her words are making it possible for others to find a solid place to stand.

Hyperlinks added by MDH.