Thursday, May 08, 2003

Amazon reviews: the people speak.

Eileen says they are the "Wild West" of reviewing, to be loved and feared.

Jonathan admits to having written a few in his time.

And Taylor Brady notes that Patrick Durgin has an Amazon review of Lyn Hejinian's Happily. To wit:

Ruminative and glad, April 9, 2000
Reviewer: Patrick F. Durgin from the midwest
Happily is a long / short poem (about 40 pages) in which Hejinian's "language of inquiry" tackles one of the more prevelant inquiries a person is bound to undertake: happiness. Happiness does not equal banality or "prettiness." In fact, in "Happily," Hejinian has distilled the sensuality of reason, the phenomenology of history / chronology, and the last century (from Stein to Mac Low) of poetic experiment and cleared space for a new conception of beauty. One which is pointed, poignant, and pleasantly difficult -- the poem posits happiness as a choice implicating a context: "history with a future" -- the book is necessary. And that's more than I can say for many other books on the subject.

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