DARK~SKY SOCIETY
“Consider her verse coiled and sprung; and, to paraphrase an exalted homegrown colloquialism, ‘busted loose.’”
—— Greg Tate
“Hopper steps right into the center, inside her own body and known life, and offers to say what the less courageous or less moved leave unsaid… This is a book that keeps adding and adding a column of figures, each time reaching a different answer. We read it as it must have been written: knowing that the trying itself is the only possible honorable, proferrable answer.”
——Jane Hirshfield
“the book is filled with a dizzying array of juxtapositions, dislocations, and other stylistic challenges… This [is] a deeply challenging book, its challenges rewarded by each re-reading, as reader becomes witness, filling in, finishing fragments, making connections... ”
—-Martha Collins
ORDERS
Barnes & Noble
Powell’s
PRAISE
“‘Not // I Have a dream // A cold, cold feeling’ closes Hopper’s “The Good Caucasian;”…these unsettling poems trace Hopper’s struggle to make sense of terrible legacies, from racial violence in the name of white female bodies to a father’s terminal illness as a site of private and public histories. Hopper’s lines halt, knot, interdigitate, and stutter, but they never flinch. She leaves that to the reader. What she doesn’t offer us are easy epiphanies, a bid for being a good caucasian, or post-race snake oil. This is difficult work for a time when ‘any touch/will bruise’. Dark~Sky Society insists we reach and be reached anyway.”
—Douglas Kearney
“Ailish Hopper is a poet's poet, being brave and fearless in style and content....”
—— Melanie Henderson
PRESS
FIELD
Jam Tarts
BIRD IN THE HEAD
Winner of the Center for Book Arts prize, selected by Jean Valentine.
“Reading, I sense the [poet’s] father himself as another, opposite poet, nearly invisible---this is a book of yearning, egolessness, and wise love.”
——Jean Valentine
PRESS
Kenyon Review Online
Boston Phoenix
ORDERS
Center for Book Arts