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.
“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
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
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
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