Reviews
A review of Counterclaims in TLR.
A review of Demonstrategy in STRIDE.
A review of American Anger on NPR.
A review of American Anger on Bustle.
A review of American Anger in Library Journal.
A review of American Anger in Publishers Weekly.
An essay about American Anger by Walter Cummins.
A review of I’m Here to Learn to Dream in Your Language, at Publishers Weekly.
A poem by Robert Loydell, responding to Lines of Inquiry.
A review of As Much As, If Not More Than in Publishers Weekly.
Mention by Anis Shivani of from unwritten histories, in which Shivani praises the poetry’s “profound metaphysical meanings.”
First Fire, Then Birds has been named one of the “Most Important Books of Fall 2010” by Anis Shivani at the Huffington Post.
A starred review of First Fire, Then Birds: Obsessionals 1985–2010 in Publishers Weekly: “Sometimes achingly beautiful in their accumulated details, sometimes grisly and violent, and sometimes tersely intellectual, Hix’s collections have always been hard to forget: since his debut with the sonnets of Perfect Hell (1996), his books have differed greatly one from another, each with its signature long poem or sequence—100 snapshotlike poems about love and sex (“Orders of Magnitude”), enticingly baffling fragments of dialect verse (“Eighteen Maniacs”), a set of repetitive prose preludes and verse fugues (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”), even a truly gripping narrative (called, grimly, “A Manual of Happiness”), based loosely on the Book of Job, about a father repeatedly struck by lightning and his children’s violent deaths. Formalists cherish Hix’s frequent meter and rhyme; devotees of experiment enjoy the bizarre disjunctions and the philosophical demands. This retrospective shuffles individual poems and sequences from his first seven books to good effect, out of chronological order (along with aphorisms from a book of prose). Hix may make new readers’ heads spin with his changes of focus, but he also gives them the chance to see his work whole.”
A review by Abigail Deutsch of Incident Light, in which Deutsch says the book “rings with many voices.”
A review by Troy Jollimore of Incident Light, in which Jollimore calls the world of Incident Light “a spooky realm of perpetual uncertainty and eerily pervasive danger.”
A review by Susan M. Schultz of Incident Light, in which Schultz remarks on how representative is the story the book tells, “the age-old story of loss, secrets, and identity.”
A review of Incident Light and David Lehman’s Yeshiva Boys on the Entertainment Weekly website, by Ken Tucker.
A review of Chromatic, as part of an ominbus review by David Mason in Hudson Review.