Author Heather Hartley, a West Virginia native, is published
by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her first book, Knock Knock, is reviewed
below.
From Publisher’s Weekly:
Hartley's
first book is full of appetite and steeped in European culture—it will make you
want to book a one-way ticket to Paris or Naples. Hartley is always attentive
to sound, her poems carefully worded but not overwrought; even the table of
contents reads like a poem: "The Sorceress of the Russian Sauna,"
"Sleeping with War and Peace." By turns sexy and wry, Hartley (the
Paris editor of Tin House) reminds us that it "takes time and careful
attention/ to pluck, savor and suck out / your breathtaking core," but
also, in "Advice for the Hirsute," that "you can only wax your
crotch so long before finally, finally / the hair creeps back like dark widow's
weeds." She treats hunger as a source of humor, delighting in
mistranslated menus—"filet of duck with gentle fruit sauce . . . a duet of
three pairs"—but also as means of grieving, questioning, and coping:
"is it bad luck to eat the salami of a dead man?" Underneath the wit
of Hartley's work, there is something probing, as if she is seeking to lay the
sad world bare: "I've written all over the city in these black
boots."