p e e p

p e e p

“peep is a tour de force, and it’s more than a tour de force. It displays deep within itself, for all its intellectual and imaginative power and self-delight, a curious tenderness and vulnerability. The book glories in language and thinking; it’s imaginative and bold; but it’s also intimate. If I were asked to account for this intimacy, especially in the face of all the other effects that Blau realizes, I might say, diffidently, that Blau is the performer of her own experience, but she is also its scholar and critic….
“Though her flexible diction is present-day, though she has a gender-specific savviness and élan that probably wouldn’t have been possible before the advent of the twenty-first century (or thereabouts), though she’s street-wise, nothing in her work is just contemporary, nothing is independent of anything else. As hip as she is, she’s also a throwback to the Romantic vocation of organic form. All her effects are emanations of the fullness with which her sensibility inhabits language and the confident way her imagination takes possession of her experience.” — from Vijay Seshadri’s foreword

“Danielle Blau obsessively plays with language until she hits something wondrous and strange. Her debut volume, peep, is jaunty and deft, utterly fresh, formally innovative, but it is also filled with secret hurts and sorrows. It has philosophical depths. Buoyant and brimming with linguistic maneuvers, it is ultimately a work of soul-making.” — Edward Hirsch

“Danielle Blau’s peep cannot be read swiftly. There isn’t verbal-sleight-of-hand in this verse, yet peep challenges a reader to grasp rhythm in form, to internalize meaning and the joy in language. Urban yet measured, these poems demand an active reader who grows into each journey.” — Yusef Komunyakaa

 

Reviews of  p e e p

Harvard Review (September 1, 2022)

We expect great things from winners of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Danielle Blau’s peep … meets and exceeds those expectations. Blau is a trained philosopher, but these poems are not abstract, tidy thought-puzzles. In peep, Blau uses palindromes as a tenet of poetic structure and even meaning, returning to the titular palindrome in the collection’s penultimate stanza and suggesting that the volume itself is a poem.

The book’s palindromic structure demands that each poem be read forwards and backwards. The best poems send us from the last line back to the first in search of a reflective structure, or a kind of volta or turn in the middle—an end that is a beginning. Blau’s poems almost seem recondite by design. Like a game of three-card monte, their simple setup tempts us to peep beneath the sleight of hand—and when we do look, the hidden card’s location bewilders us …

Blau’s verse is clear-eyed, attentive to craft, and often wild. Although the author is Jewish and queer, these poems can hardly be called confessional, even when they employ the personal pronoun. Instead of lurid details, the personae we find here speak sotto voce, embodiments of innocence and experience. We find this uncertainty of being in the poems and also between the lines …

These inversions show how a poet can rend a solid structure, or even a human being, asunder; how a mirror’s reflection is not a metaphor for wholeness, but for absence, loss, and open endings. — Josh Brewer (To read the whole of this review, go to Harvard Review)

Los Angeles Review of Books (July 31, 2022)

From the title, epigraph, and first poem of p e e p, poet Danielle Blau announces the power of the palindrome as a governing force in her poetics. Beyond rhetorical play and textual trick, the palindrome pushes language to mean beyond its maker’s intention … These are palindromes of color, sound, time, and identity itself, and by cataloging them Blau demonstrates that no matter the poet’s control of punctuation, grammar, line break, so much of meaning is made and multiplied beyond one speaker’s intentions. Emily Dickinson famously loved ‘noon,’ that infinite word, and it is this relationship between language and time that excites and delights throughout peep. Blau is drawn to this play with multiplicity, repetition, self-revision, and erasure across many motifs — boxes with peepholes, one-way mirrored bathroom walls in a restaurant called peep. These poems come to function like palindromes, as portals through the pain and pleasure of experience, the illusions of relationships, and the performativity of expression, maybe even existence, itself … Throughout p e e p there is impressive formal variety. Blau is unafraid of being over-the-top and circuitous in long multisection poems as well as holding her own in compressed prose poems. She is a verbal omnivore, drawing on high and low illusion and all lexical registers from Anglo-Saxon compounds (‘dazzleworn,’ ‘skirling,’ ‘aswarm’), text-talk, archaic terminology (‘Hapax Legomenon’), joke, pun, and nursery rhyme equally as in ‘Full Rhymes to Live (More Fully) By’: ‘do you dream / in turtle green?’ … Blau’s poetics is as radical as it is entertaining, as charged with the unknown as it riddled with the quest to know … Here is a voice that is hungry for evidence of its own existence. The reader, rather than merge with the speaker, must stay a bit apart, off-stage, backstage, at times pulling the curtain strings ourselves: ‘Although if you’re like me — Are / you like me? Please like me…’ With this invitation to participate and enjoy the speaker’s company, Blau offers the reader more attention and power than many collections, let alone debuts, do. Entering Blau’s consciousness, we end up one step deeper into our own multiple, irrational, infinite, and unknowable selves. — Elizabeth Metzger (To read the whole of this review, go to LARB, Metzger review.)

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (July 22, 2022)

In her debut collection, Danielle Blau gives me a glimpse — a peep — at the emptiness at the center of all things. The emptiness within and the emptiness without. And she makes the view beautiful, though no less unsettling, even terrifying. The book is called p e e p, and if you hear slang for ‘friend,’ you hear — and see in those lowercases — something of the style of the poems, wise but not academic, free but piercing, formal but artfully fickle about it. And if you’re the sort of reader who notices that ‘peep’ is a palindrome, you’ve got another way into these poems, poems that make a ritual out of structure, a solidity out of the meaningful meaninglessness of numerology …. The palindrome, in this context, becomes not only a figure for the formal imagination at work here, but also for Blau’s obsession with the emptiness—the ‘hole’ in the ‘mirror’ that is also, sometimes, unexpectedly, a ‘seed,’ a placeholder for possibility …. [In] these virtuosic poems—there’s a villanelle, a poem that goes in and out of strong, chiming couplets, persona poems and couplets and blocks of prose — the engagement with emptiness is not only linguistic but emotional …. What, the allegory asks, can be seen? And what is a friend? What is a daughter, and what is a mother? Is ‘lost’ the only real condition any of us ever inhabits? The poems answer by calling to—and into—the very abyss they see. — Jesse Nathan

New York Times (May 20, 2022)

The winsome, intellectually probing poems in Blau’s debut collection examine lived experience through the lens of myth, memory and rigorous philosophical inquiry, with one eye on the instant when, ‘at this moment’s close, you’ll cross the border / into the moment after. … Your shadow’s growing shorter.’

Publishers Weekly (May 7, 2022)

The poem that opens Blau’s ruminative debut is a knockout, riffing on palindromes to burst forth like a vernal pond in spring: ‘as Sun,/ uncaging coiled ribs, exhaled pure/ vitriolage of Spring/ &—once more/ newly heaven-/ bent on ravishment, & scour, & scraping/ clean without// distinction—down-/ lusted blind translucence towards us. This lush voice, however, is less present in later poems, such as the long poem ‘The Fear,’ which begins: ‘If you’re like/ me, a person// who’s alive/ today// in this world even// now as we speak there’s/ no more I can say.’ It asks, ‘Does anybody know/ something good to do with 15 lbs of yuzu fruit?/ Just now/ I wrote that. Did/ you see? That/ was me/ just writing that just now. Insinuated trauma, a disappearing father, and a mother who doles out canned peas for magic pills intersect, making these pages like a fractured fairy tale. A prose poem, ‘We’re all Human, all of us Girls, and We’re Young,’ mixes horrific histories of women killed in the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire with specifics from the narrator’s own life, such as ‘Once I took a bath with my goldfish. This collection teases and perplexes.

Los Angeles Review of Books (May 2022)

To venture into Danielle Blau’s p e e p, a collection which has just won the 16th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, is to embark on a complicated ride, or, as the saying now goes, an immersive experience: varied in texture and pace, full of unexpected twists and turns, always intense. Or reading p e e p resembles a visit to a museum whose every gallery offers not only a different exhibit but a distinct atmosphere and mood. Some galleries prove to be cavernous, opening out into one spacious room after another. Other exhibits unfold in strictly limited spaces: among these are a villanelle, a few lapidary vignettes, and a prose poem (or chorus? oratorio?) entitled ‘We’re Human, All of Us Girls, and We’re Young,’ occasioned by the ‘108th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.’ p e e p also offers a tour through space (lots of Brooklyn and Queens geography) and time (recurrent childhood memories)…. The animating spirit throughout is one of distilled complexity. The constant pulsation of Blau’s poetic energy means that the pauses are pleasurable but also suspenseful: where will the poet’s restless intelligence lead us next? — Rachel Hadas