Life
On Effacement "Elemental and unsparing, quiet and startling, Arnold's supple syntax is a source of gravity and vertigo. It is an acute expression of a mind's awareness of the tragedy of effacement: in burning through it, we gain a keener sense of our predicament."--John Palattella, The Nation
On Civilization "The power of this work flows not from subject matter alone, but from the formal friction of the lines themselves. Like the modernist poet George Oppen, Arnold works in a ductile free-verse measure. Her tone is free ranging. She employs the vocabulary of science at one moment and translates Greek lyrics at the next; she takes on the idiom of family shouting matches in some poems and of philosophical inquiry in others. But the poems never sag into diffuseness. Arnold's phrases are condensed, stark. Each word seems to sear itself into the page, like molten platinum. In a book that renders personal and political instability with unrelenting fierceness, there's genuine pleasure in such consummate artfulness."--Peter Campion, Tikkun
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