The above review appeared last Wednesday on WPSU, NPR’s central Pennsylvania affiliate. The clip is from BookMark, a weekly book reviews show. This is just, I think, the second review of the book to reach the public, and the first time my name’s ever been mentioned on the radio.
The coolest part is hearing someone else who you’ve never met read some lines of your poem out loud — and then still hearing them as they sound in your head. Poetry works! Here’s how Maddox ends the review:
Indeed, as Timothy Green claims in ‘Hiking Alone’, perhaps all we ever want is ‘a little darkness to climb out of.’ In American Fractal, he provides the dark, the light, and a rope of words for climbing from one insight to another.
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p.s. Marjorie Maddox has reviewed for Rattle in the past, but I only just discovered that she’s written a young adult book of baseball poems. How cool is that? Looking around a little more, the poems seem to be good, too: “…all hard-pitched hope outthrown, thrown out/of luck, of heart, of the hard heat of summer/and what won’t be.” If I’d read that in 8th grade, I would have gotten into poetry sooner!
Marjorie Maddox also edited a great anthology of Pennsylvania poets! Great review, Tim, and a pretty cool radio show.