Body & Glass

Reviews

"The naturalness of Koeneke's essayistic explorations and his adept weaving of disparate sources make this an engaging, thoughtful, and consistently surprising collection."—Publishers Weekly

"How refreshing; culturally grounded poems as if culture mattered."—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

"Here is a preternatural social sensibility that remains poignant even as it confronts what today passes for the sentimental; here is an elegant figural technique that never disappoints."—Judith Goldman, Drunken Boat

"'A star arriving firmly / at the center of its cluster' is Rodney Koeneke’s Body & Glass. There is something very singing and also staid about these poems. I mean they have both a freshness and the mark of an experienced hand behind them. I hesitate to call it a 'maturity' because it has a jouissance I don't associate with that word. These poems continue to yield fruit on multiple readings: 'furzed glebe' . . .  'prefer your lineaments / to any rotting / thing this world adores.' They feel nutritious to me somehow, nutrient-dense, coming out of great care, great grief, great toil (for all their sprezzatura): 'antiphons' slurring / surmising the psalm.'"
—Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Poetry Foundation

"The poems in Body & Glass read as if they’re dissolving in the volatile solvent that is thinking, and though it’s easy to be carried away when Koeneke waxes with tools like assonance and spontaneous rhyme—carried away to a place where recognition of the poem’s work can often be dusted out of vantage—it is just as important to see the back and forth between body and glass, between naming and name. The cumulative effect of reading many of Koeneke’s poems in one sitting feels like the mind being crocheted, portions hidden away into lockets, others coded into nodes."
—Tyler Flynn Dorholt, 4squarereview

"Composed with an incredible, subtle sharpness, his is a poetics, and even a politics, that embrace both optimism and exhaustion."
—Rob McLennan's Blog

"Much of his book plays with notions of agency. There is a particularly effective destabilizing shift between the third-person mode of some of his poems' titles and the 'I' that then acts out those titles . . . Koeneke's blend of pathos, erudition, and whimsy results in an enjoyable collection that rewards repeated engagement."
Publishers Weekly

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