Blue Mistaken for Sky reviewed in Rhino Poetry
Andrea Hollander's Blue Mistaken for Sky was reviewed by Susanna Lang
Below is a brief excerpt of Susanna Lang’s review of Andrea Hollander’s newest poetry collection in Rhino Poetry. The review was originally published on August 7, 2018. To read the full review, visit their site here.
The poems in Blue Mistaken for Sky are carefully sequenced, so that the umbrella that a stranger held over the speaker’s head in the first poem is no longer needed or desired in the last few pages, when the woman in “Music” stands in the rain,
pooling on the sidewalk,
rushing over the curb.
That same rain that pursued her through the earlier betrayals becomes a “sweet-tempered yatter” that she listens to as if it were a concert performed only for her, while she lies fully dressed alone in her bed. This is a pleasure that she chooses for herself, “because [she] could.”
The language of these poems is straightforward, a woman speaking directly to the reader as if we sat together at the birch veneer table in her new kitchen. The details of everyday life become oracle, the syntax of everyday life heightened by metaphor and double entendre.
