THEY CANT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME
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2001 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY
THE FIERCE "QUESTIONS" that open They Can't Take That
Away from Me radiate throughout the book—urgent questions,
fueled by desire, loss, and the hope for an art to embody "the
soul circling its lessons." Gail Mazur's poems move in a direction
she describes with both tenderness and irony as "leaning into
pain as into a mother's arms." At once coloquial and lyrical,
they stake a claim in our capacity to look at art and life unflinchingly,
to lean into the passion and pain that are out inescapable inheritance,
and live. That is what they can't take away from this indispensable
poet.
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“Colloquial as well as eloquent, pitch-perfect no matter how
delicate her material, Gail Mazur has found a way to write that
is completely responsive to her remarkable qualities of mind. She
gives us the exact ‘feel’ of contemporary life in our
disquieting republic, the uncanny way in which love, hope, and endurance
are shot through by contingency, dread, and estrangement. Full of
warmth, humor, and a dry-eyed toughness, her work is a superb personal
and civic achievement.”
-National
Book Award Judges’ Citation
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Gail Mazur's poems are dexterous, agile, engaged, and fearless in
describing the fears of the person writing, fears that are endemic
to everyone by virtue of being at risk in the gadzillion ways we
are all at risk. It makes me happy to see my frightening condition
so skillfully rendered. It makes me happy the way good work in any
of the arts makes me happy. Because such work exhibits human prowess
used without arrogance, for the purpose of understanding, it is
a rare and precious source of hope.
—Michael Ryan
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Each
detail is imbued with deep feeling for real people living in a world
where everything has its cost. Mazur's cunning, skeptical intelligence
never mitigates, but only intensifies, such feeling.... Humor and
pain are never mutually exclusive; they are fused in the act of
making art, For Mazur that act is one of fidelity, both to the specific,
creaturely life she portrays with intense feeling, and to her own
skeptical intelligence.
—Peter Campion, AGNI
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Mazur's
poems represent the process of coming to terms with difficulty, a
task she executes on behalf of us all, with rare imagination and intelligence.
Her work offers pictures of a recognizable contemporary life... not
as photographs, but as the true and hidden places behind the photographs:
the texture of our life, to the touch and to the mind.
—Graham Christian, Harvard Review
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