" Warren] has begun writing longer poems, putting her stamp on a running notational mode whose other practitioners include Stephanie Young, Anselm Berrigan, and Jacqueline Waters. I think you can hear the durational projects, the self-conscious day-scores, of Bernadette Mayer and of Lewis Warsh farther back in the tradition."--Brian Blanchfield, pen.org
The third full-length collection from Bay Area poet Alli Warren, Little Hill comprises seven long poems written with propulsive prosody in an almost daybook fashion, examining our present, politically charged moment. These poems are at once energetic and contemplative, intimate and direct, as Warren directs her attention to capitalism, gender, love, inequality, and resistance. Despite the dystopian now, Warren finds promise in the smallest human instances of tenderness, ecological connection, and political solidarity. Little Hill is about learning to live and love in the 21st century while not shying away from all there is to struggle against.
Industry Reviews
Praise for Little Hill:
"The poems of Alli's newest book, Little Hill, are wild, abundant with the natural beauty of a language that attends to her images with fierce imperative and effecting a nurturing cool ... There is a naturalism to the poems of Little Hill, a departure from the hyper-mobile, shorter poems of her previous books, unfolding an ecology of ideas yielded from Alli's wry observations and expansive thinking. ... These poems, especially now, return me to that environment beyond the confines of my immediate everyday, mindful of my connection to the language and life greater than my own but no less fragile."-Ted Dodson, The Believer
Praise for I Love It Though:
"[Warren] has begun writing longer poems, putting her stamp on a running notational mode whose other practitioners include Stephanie Young, Anselm Berrigan, and Jacqueline Waters. I think you can hear the durational projects, the self-conscious day-scores, of Bernadette Mayer and of Lewis Warsh farther back in the tradition."-Brian Blanchfield, pen.org
"These poems invite the reader into an uncanny immersion within the quotidian-akin to tasting the sharpness of sky color or watching song penetrate office walls. Taken together, their power rests not in the visionary aim of Rimbaud's "derangement of the senses," but in the willful blurring of the material limits of language-a rich verbal synesthesia that suggests a collective politics of bodies: muscle, blood and bone."-Jamie Townsend, Boston Review
"Warren provides us with poetry that proves that the smallest interactions with the ordinary world can bring a whisper of hope to those who simply want to adore Earth's extraordinary offerings."-Tay Marie Lorenzo, Fields Magazine
"Warren finds sublimity in strands of affect and experience that cling to the ultimate unanswerable."-Small Press Distribution
"In I Love It Though, growing authority and growing bewilderment appear to be out on a date, perhaps married, "the bottom / of the surface of the sound" never not in effect. Propelled by closely parsed internal commotion, the book is a great follow-up to Here Come the Warm Jets, itself a great follow-up to the earlier books that rightly put Alli Warren on the map as a poet to watch, be reckoned with, read and reread."-Nathaniel Mackey
Where were you when the very bird Alli Warren winged in upon opened its beak & began to speak? I was in Queens. My jaw dropped. Actually it was Alli ventriloquizing the bird, right there on my windowsill, with the pigeons in the airshaft. As I greedily thumb through the pages, honey seeps through the cracks, 'one gape follows the next.'"-Julian Talamantez Brolaski
The title of Alli Warren's rich and various collection of new poems-I Love It Though-should alert readers to one of its prevailing moods, that of a skeptic's affirmation. Being that of a skeptic, the affirmation comes with reservations. Alli Warren knows there are limits to the possibilities of any given day. She writes from the experiences of attuned observations, surveying the landscape with a hesitant but not unwilling participant's attention to interplays of detail. She tracks ridge and crevice, inclination and fold; they belong to the topography of social landscapes and the bodies in them and also to the structures of her articulated thoughts. Days take place, abounding with forms. And thus it is that, with respect to affirmation, these poems begin with reservations. But they do not end there. If skeptical affirmation is one of this book's moods, love is another. It is shaped out of the quicknesses of Warren's attention, guiding her embrace of the specific given good and her grief over all that's malevolent. This is a powerful and beautiful book, and the poems that comprise it should be read over and over again."-Lyn Hejinian
