Two tragic events haunt this powerful first collection—the kind of events that “change the alignment/ of every season after” and tear open vast absences in a life. Alison Prine bravely explores those absences here, engaging in the struggle to make something “immune to ruin” out of what is broken and to mend the connections severed by death, even while acknowledging the inability of language to fill the void left by loved ones or to find easy answers. “This isn’t consolation,” as she says in one poem. Instead, poem by poem, she makes a dwelling for herself and the reader, “building from the inside” while remaining attuned to the possibility of correspondences in the outside world. And through the quiet urgency of her voice, she finds “a secular way of praying.” This book is a blessing.
– Jeffrey Harrison, author of Into Daylight and judge of the 2014 Cider Press Review Book Award
In Alison Prine’s elemental, lapidary poems, place is transposed, and time moves recursively. The past infuses the present with such unrelenting clarity that the result is a startling and richly potent consolation.
— Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
“I like to be at the edge of open waters,” Alison Prine writes in “City of Bridges,” and Prine’s poems share her affinity for the liminal, the weather-swept, and the vast. Even as she studies the significance of our smallest gestures toward and away from one another, Prine’s scope is the wide sweep of a life, and its defining griefs and desires. Prine’s vision is tender and precise, and her voice is no less fierce for its quality of quiet. These are intimate, necessary poems in which language is the vital blood that circulates through our most important questions.
— Karin Gottshall, author of The River Won’t Hold You
Reviews
“Alison Prine’s brilliant debut, Steel is exacting in its treatment of memory … Prine’s prophetic voice evokes an early Louise Glück as it interrogates the self.” Diana Whitney’s review from SFGATE
“Like language, family and time, Prine’s words show us, steel represents strength and destruction in measures we can never fully grasp.” Rachel Elizabeth Jones’ review in Seven Days
Alison Prine 