"A book-length poem navigating belief, black lives, the tragedies of Trump, and the boundaries of being a woman."
The Small Blades Hurt(Illustrated) by EricaDawson Hardcover, 78 Pages, Published 2013 by Measure Press Inc. ISBN-13: 978-1-939574-04-6, ISBN: 1-939574-04-8
"In The Small Blades Hurt, Erica Dawson picks up where her debut collection, Big-Eyed Afraid, leaves off: "The world's outside. I'm in." She moves from her border state Maryland to the true South, the Midwest, and back, delivering poems where a single memory can tangle with America's collective past. Dawson finds a home in the tradition of formal poetry, carving a place all her own, whether manic and cozy in a poem with only ..."
Big-Eyed Afraid(7th Edition) by EricaDawson, Mary Jo Salter Paperback, 104 Pages, Published 2007 by The Waywiser Press ISBN-13: 978-1-904130-26-0, ISBN: 1-904130-26-7
""In Big-Eyed Afraid, a first book of genuine originality, Erica Dawson turns the mirror held up to nature on herself. Both humorous and heart-wrenching, Dawson balances formal adroitness with a 21st-century colloquial idiom modulating between demotic and mandarin registers, a voice all her own. Employing numerous forms, including the rondeau, ballade, rhyme royal and her own adaptation of the In Memoriam stanza, Dawson elevates the self ..."
""How to extract "wonder from sediment," especially if the sediment is vaguely toxic? This is the central question of Charlie Malone's Questions About Circulation. One answer is to dig--the literal trace of land use, the lateral spread of material history, the billowing field of childhood memory. These poems brim with glacial moraine, crumbling mills, wild blackberry thickets, and "a big peaceful cement pond [reflecting] tarnished copper ..."
"Mark Strand's Blizzard of One features a collage of his own devising on the cover: an expanse of red and blue geometric planes, broken up by the appearance of an ice floe on the imaginary horizon. The image invites the viewer to fill up the surrounding emptiness. So too does the white space surrounding Strand's taut, spare, metaphysical verse. The quest for the single lyric's integrity and wholeness sets Strand apart from those poets f ..."
""hell of birds is ferocious in its energy and acrobatics. With arresting images and unexpected enjambment, the poems twist and turn, often coming to a halt so surprising, you're left reeling in the white space, out of breath. Kimberly writes, "One day the world will sing through your blood." After reading this collection, you'll feel the earth in your bones."-Erica Dawson, author of When Rap Spoke Straight to God "You've not read a coll ..."