BOA Blog

A solid review of AWAYWARD by Jennifer Kronovet. This review was written by Jake Marmer and appear on Forward magazine's website: http://www.forward.com/articles/117928/ Reading Jennifer Kronovet’s recent collection “Awayward,” you may think she’s translating from another language, transposing foreign syntactical structures, turns of phrase, rhythms, tonalities — a whole unfamiliar psyche — into English. Kronovet’s speculative original is forever inaccessible, and can only be known through her translation. “Known”, though, would be to overestimate its accessibility because, while at all times confident and articulate, her poetry remains exotically alien and outside of the normal conventions of meaning. If anything, it is...

"No syllable is squandered in the lush descriptions; each word builds upon the previous to fashion an existence both delicate and decrepit. Howard’s sentences read as if she’d spun them in a linguistic centrifuge to rid them of excess. What remains is condensed, colorful, necessary."