STORM DAMAGE

Here is poetry at once intense and resolute from a poet who captures the language of speech and gives it back to us matter-of-fact dressed in cruelty and kindness. In these poems, nothing is what it seems. Rather, things are what they are, beneath the camouflage. Here are poems about shared memories, common experiences and everyday conflicts, presented with startling clarity. Nobody has made our language speak in quite this way before not with this keen a sense of attention and always with that rare power to upend the way we experience even the most recognizable emotions, which is a way of talking about discovery. Her vision reminds us who we are with each new gasp of recognition. If the poems of Melissa Hotchkiss were clothes, they would try you on for size and later, without quite knowing how it happened, you would find yourself wearing them: spare, subtly woven, delicate, thoroughly sophisticated. It seems more than hours and hours the tide takes to go completely away far as the moon allows some things turn kinder as they leave.