|
| ||||||||||||||||||
ReviewsReviews of The Glaze from Breaking / Reviews of individual poems / Reviews of short fiction
"She reminded me a lot of the early work of Boris Pasternak where the poet does not so much observe the natural world as fuse with it breaking down the boundaries between speaker and landscape... She also does clever things with sound... [and] has the odd image that manages to be both unusual and just right." - Belinda Cooke reviews six new volumes from Stride, Shearsman 63/4, April 2005. "...a secondary level of suggestiveness on which the overall themes of this collection become clear. This is characteristic of the way in which the best of the poems and sequences in The Glaze from Breaking succeed: the implications of particular images shift and are clarified in time. The first sentence in the book tells us that 'Theories of self can be demolished', and the poems proceed to show subjective language rewriting itself, as where the word 'breaking' in the book's title comes to inhabit many of its different senses at once..." - Matthew Sperling, Matthew Sperling reviews three new collections from Stride, Tower Poetry, June 2005. "Her language is fabulous." - Mary Agner, online review, May 13, 2005. "Merriam, a Canadian poet now living in the United States, published her book through a British publisher, and its distribution in North America is limited to overseas orders. But readers of contemporary poetry - especially those intrigued by the possibilities of the prose-poem form - will find this small yet deeply felt collection well worth seeking out for its elegant exploration of love and loss, recovery and redemption, eroticism and the echoes of the heart." - Kate Washington, "Beautifully Formed: A Review of Joanne Merriam's The Glaze From Breaking," chicklit, March 30, 2005. "Merriam's entire collection uses silence to give her work an eerie feel of helplessness. Silence is a kidnapper of communication, and Merriam suffocates us in the inability to express, as though '[m]outh sealed in nectar, silence lies dormant on my tongue.'... Her images are sharp and vivid..." - Alicia Higginbotham, "The Glaze From Breaking by Joanne Merriam," Verse, March 5, 2005. "Memory, tenderness, and its flip side 'estrangement' - these are key themes in Joanne Merriam's exquisite poems. With an accomplished lyric ear and eye, Merriam's images soar through her verses and prose poems like plants flinging their spores. The city is always in the frame yet, out of the window, lies the natural world; a beautifully rendered amphitheatre in which the poet explores personal relationships and the relation in which we stand to the world. Merriam's emotional honesty, combined with her convincing, startling images, will transport you." - Andy Brown "Joanne Merriam saves herself by travelling, remembering, and by long lines and prose poems well-suited to Stride's new square format books." - Jane Routh, "Fireside Reading," Stride Magazine, January 2005. Reviews of individual poems:
"... a few real gems ..." - "Aliens in our midst," James McGoram, Evasion, Issue 3, Vol. 2, February 2003. "Along with "Deer April," Vallum includes a poem called "Cunt" by Joanne Merriam. This title, like "Deer April," sounds like a cliche (one can only imagine how many poems with this title read at how many slams, included in how many zines). Yet Merriam uses language to shift the reader's attention from the title to the surprising and ironic, yes, to something lovely, letting the poem deliver a fresh shock." - Philip Miller, review of "Vallum: Contemporary Poetry," literary magazine review, Vol. 21, No. 3, Fall 2002.
Reviews of short fiction:
"'Little Ambushes' by Joanne Merriam is about an art exchange program in which an alien spends a month in a human house learning human art... Merriam seems to have been aiming for emotional depth, but I couldn't feel it... At the end, I didn't care about what had happened." - Alex Dally MacFarlane, "Strange Horizons, August 2007," The Fix, October 14, 2007. "Merriam's deft, detailed prose finds its way as easily around the love between the narrator and Brenda as around the world's reaction to the aliens--first denial and then weaponization. It's finally a love story, though, a flashing vignette about what it's like to lose someone." - Elizabeth A. Allen, "Strange Horizons, March, 2007," Tangent Online, 30 March 2007. "Be warned that this story is not as light-hearted as the title would lead you to believe. 'Hippopotamus' is a dark tale of consequences, of thwarted desire, and of the discovery of a bizarre crossing point to the afterlife." - Jason Fischer, review of Strange Horizons, 6th March 2006 in Tangent Online, 2 April 2006. "Joanne Merriam's 'The Purple Hippopotamus Wading Pool' is affecting and well written, but it seemed to me to be a story about how women who cheat on their husbands will, or should, be punished and degraded horribly, a position I find troubling, though certainly not every reader will see the story this way, or mind." - Matthew Cheney, "Recent Fiction at Strange Horizons," March 21, 2006.
"The story starts off grounded in reality. The polar bears lay about and the tourists snap pictures. The timeline then flits around, providing some extraneous background that interrupts the pace of the story. When we return to the tundra, reality has been usurped by fantasy and the plot takes one twist, then another. Since I adore polar bears, the story drew me in right away and the twists kept me entertained to the end." - Suzanne Church, review of "Walking Hibernation," Tangent Online, 2004-11-10.
"Walking Hibernation is an interesting, if not completely successful, look at an alternative reality where the myths of our world--dragons, werecreatures, vampires, and so on--are not only real but fully recognised by the people living there." - Patrick Samphire, review of "Walking Hibernation," Speculative Fiction Reviews, 5 October 2004. |
