The Dazzling Land
"Wallace Stevens wrote that all poetry is experimental poetry. Brigitte Byrd's poems are experimental in the best, truest sense: she brings elements into new and unforeseen relationships. And 'There [is] music always in this imaginary understanding.' All the poems in this book are afloat in infinite possibilities and 'the shadows of exploration.' As she writes in '(of the impossible),' 'This was a dazzling land this imagination.' —Reginald Shepherd
"In Brigitte Byrd's new book, The Dazzling Land, theres simply too much texture to do justice to the work by pulling out a quote. But one sentence, 'We fed on sentences until words made up lies' is compelling for its paradoxical truth-telling. These poems are so deeply imagined, so funny and profane, so formally inventive, there is little here that does not burn sharply with the experience of truth. This book represents one of the most fully realized portraits of the self Ive read in a long time, a vigorous mirroring of consciousness. Its symphonic and unflinching, and pleasure reverberates for the reader in every line of this bold work." —David Dodd Lee
"The Dazzling Land is a magnificent book by a gifted writer. The poems gathered here are expansive in line and breath, soothing over you, the reader, like a cool wind filled with sweet fragrance . . . These poems offer us a clear elixir--to use the poets own wordsfor forgiveness . . . this is a tremendous, sonorous collection, one that will stay in your ears and mind for a good long time." —Virgil Suarez
Review of The Dazzling Land
"With a combination of poems that borrow from the traditions of French automatic writing, postmodern experimentation, and language poetry, Brigitte Byrd in The Dazzling Land bravely offers the reader a range of work that crackles with unexpected turns and astounding wordplay. Her work is difficult, but if one is patient, the poems here will open up in an intensely intellectual and complexly emotional display." — Apalachee Review read full review
Fence Above the Sea
"Her poems are like the best music: as intimate as a lovers body, as startling and fulfilling as a dream." —David Kirby
"The prose poems of Brigitte Byrd are a hymn to the everyday, but a hymn based on the contingencies of language. The six series in Fence Above the Sea are homage to poets and thinkers including Rilke, Cixous, Char, Artaud, and Radiohead, among others. She is a wise, ebullient poet whose prose poems are mosaics of humor and loss, a playful requiem for life as it is in this dangerous new century." —Maxine Chernoff
"[Byrd's] simplicity disarms us, as though we always mistook for difficulty our own acquisitiveness, sought more where lack itself was missing. I know of few books that undergo their words as utterly. Fence Above the Sea is a primer of presentness, that unimaginable task, this being here now." —R.M. Berry
The speaker of Brigitte Byrd's debut volume pivots in the roles of mourning daughter, affectionate mother, and poet whose attention to the sensory and sensual world never falters. In language both musical and linguistically playful, Byrd revivifies the form of unlineated lyric that in her hands reminds us of its French forebears and could never be termed prosaic. These poems haunt, ache, and celebrate by turns, and always they sing.
Reviews of Fence Above the Sea
- Review by Alexis M. Smith atTarpaulin Sky
- Review by Duncan Sprattmoran at Foreword Magazine
- Review by J'Lyn Chapman at Denver Quarterly
- Review by Carrie Bennett at Chattahootchee Review
- Review by Cynthia Arrieu-King at Word for Word
- Review by Anne Heide at Parcel One