Tiffany Tsao reviews The Hazards by Sarah Holland-Batt
The Hazards
by Sarah Holland-Batt
ISBN 978-0-7022-5359-1
Reviewed by TIFFANY TSAO
The first poem of Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Hazards provides a fitting opening for a collection so beautiful, so cold, and so much about the coldness of beauty. The eponymous jellyfish speaker of the poem ‘Medusa’ is unapologetically cerebral—‘a brain trailing its nettles’, a mind ‘vain and clear as melting ice’. So much so, in fact, that the speaker seems to exist as a drifting organ of ‘bitter reason’, separate from the organs where the capacity for feeling and compassion reside: the nerves ‘blooming around [it]’ and the soul which ‘billows out like hollow silk’.
=================================Sorry you must be logged in and a current subscriber to view the rest of this content.
Please login and/or purchase a subscription.