Reviews of A Hog Slaughtering Woman
_________________________________________________________________________

"It's as though David Marlatt has imagined a four-generation novel set in rural Michigan and then lifted out the sharpest, most poignant and suggestive scenes to make poems of them––Gram snapping beans when the Jehovah's Witnesses come around to inquire after her soul; sister showing the bruise where the horse kicked her; Frances Woodburry driving her Falcon into a hog. Details, voices! Marlatt's eye is attentive and generous and his language memorable, with never a false or showy turn. The book wins our trust immediately and lures us into is queerly resonant world."

–Conrad Hilberry

"A sister kicked by a horse, a stray hog run down by a Falcon sedan, a glimpse of a grandmother's hair undone, a man killing blue-gill with a spoon–these and other incarnations achieve, in David Marlatt's testimony, the grim and wondrous power of icons and relics. These are poems that disturb and endear us to the species we recognize – not always with gladness – as our own. In A Hog Slaughtering Woman, the blood offerings, sacrifices, gospels and gossip, love and losses that we call 'family' are, as in eh accent liturgies witnessed, celebrated, sung outright. David Marlatt's is a welcomed debut."

–Thomas Lynch

Foreword by Jack Driscoll
__________________________________________________________________________

Reading A Hog Slaughtering Woman is not unlike discovering a box of daguerreotypes in the attic of an abandoned farmhouse or barn loft. Portraits: Katherine Daley, Katie Teppe, Uncle Frank, Roy Nickol, Great Grandma Agnes who tossed "her slop pot / out the upstairs window every morning."

Preserved here is a community of rural folk whose histories Marlatt so fully imagines that each character steps magically from still-life back into this world where past and present co-exist, where a young boy, unable to fall asleep on a horse hair mattress, stays awake instead to watch "that mane / and tail hair / blowing . . ." Or in a poem that brings the generations together, that same speaker finds and puts on his "dead relatives' clothes," believing that he has "climbed into . . . and breathed a second life."

The language is deceptively casual, unhurried, idiomatic, humorous at times, witty, though always that conversational, anecdotal tone is set against a range of deeply affecting emotions: the speaker's eighty-nine year old grandfather, for example, in a poem both lighthearted and full of sadness, wanders off to the "long-closed depot to / meet great grandma," herself the victim of dementia. What these poems fight against is that loss of memory and, therefore, loss of history that betrays us. Marlatt knows that to remember clearly is to reenter the past, and to refashion it is his way of keeping it new and alive.

These are people who throw little out, who relink logging chains and seamstress their own dresses, and any one of the old and infirm characters might use a worn cornbroom rather than a cane or a crutch. They are poor but not poor in heart, and time after time the dilapidated landscapes of these poems are made beautiful by the clear-eyed rendering of simple details: the horses wearing fly nets, dahlias in full fall bloom along a cracked foundation, jars of gray peaches swaybacking the cellar shelves. Marlatt stays alert out of love, and it's this attentiveness to all that surrounds and grounds these poems that makes the lives of his people real and rich and enduring.

David Marlatt is a compassionate, formidable new voice, and embodied in this truly distinctive debut collection is a vision and maturity that I find rare, wise, and absolutely unpretentious. This is the kind of book I want to praise.