Human Nature

This book knocked me flat. In a good way. The writing is exquisite. Alice Anderson's honesty will take your breath away. She has the courage to tell her heart's deepest, darkest truths while never compromising on the poet's craft. Anderson's poems are rigorous and right. They could be about trees and you'd swoon. But they aren't about trees. They are about a woman and her body and her life and the little girl who lives inside of her still. They are fiercely about one person and also about us all. I opened this book and didn't close it until I read every last poem, straight through. Human Nature is an amazing book.

Beware, all who enter here. Anderson's remarkable first book, winner of the 1994 Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, is like an outcropping of Hell -- the reader is compelled by fascination and horror to keep reading. Dedicated to Sharon Olds, these poems bear her influence: the unflinching look at reality, the rich attention to physical detail, the rush of overwhelming experience, the aesthetic control. The book's last line -- "It's the human's nature to survive -- welcome to the living." -- which also gives the book its grim and hopeful title, celebrates survival. Anderson's life force is implicit in the language throughout these poems, objective, exact, charged with an emotional force given only to those who have been to hell and returned to tell the tale. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Beware, all who enter here. Anderson's remarkable first book, winner of the 1994 Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, is like an outcropping of Hell -- the reader is compelled by fascination and horror to keep reading. Dedicated to Sharon Olds, these poems bear her influence: the unflinching look at reality, the rich attention to physical detail, the rush of overwhelming experience, the aesthetic control. The book's last line -- "It's the human's nature to survive -- welcome to the living." -- which also gives the book its grim and hopeful title, celebrates survival. Anderson's life force is implicit in the language throughout these poems, objective, exact, charged with an emotional force given only to those who have been to hell and returned to tell the tale. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)