Available from SPD
These thoughtful poems about the body--veiled, in harm's way, isolated, pleasured, painted--are written as if from a place of exile, a vast distance subverted by “a sudden flight of tiny fish,” “a wine moistened mouth”, or when “a flight of gray doves veil the sun.” In these moments the world is given breath, heat, and voice. All at once it approaches, and the beloved's unfettered body is revealed as the antidote to tyranny.
–Rikki Ducornet
Marthe Reed’s Gaze–‘Too beautiful to articulate’—dressed, undressed, terrorized, and entrancing. These unveilings, these poems, how they haunt me. Riding Angela Carter on a poetry-horse, Reed hallucinates language with certain and dissolving rhythm. Gaze at them; go blind inside this mentalist’s mind. Marthe Reed is unrelenting, unrelentingly kind.
–Kate Bernheimer
“In the seams between self and other, glance and gaze furrow, tumbling in a course of their own.” (40)
Marthe Reed’s passionate and brilliant collection Gaze finds the seams between beauty and terror—and (courageously, responsibly) stays there, coupling technology and pleasure in “the new pastoral”:
cordite
light through petalled windows (61)
The plethora of epigraphs link this writing to reading or (given that no epigraph has its origin in English) translating, revealing poetic experimentation as the give and take of an ecstatic dialogue among visionaries in a world at once paradise and bleakest hell. Here the ability to doubt must be equal to the ability to believe: “I am writing,” the author of Gaze tells us, “at the edge of faith.” Reed keeps her inquiry right on that edge, where writing might fail or fall on one side or the other, where our complicated desires bed or “collapse into the transect’s limits.” Gaze is an audacious and necessary book.
–Laura Mullen
Selected for Best Books of 2010 at No Tell Motel.
Links to reviews and features on Gaze at Black Radish Blog.