Hand & Skull

Reviews / Votes

Hand & Skull examines the complex relationships between human and nonhuman lives as well as the ways in which gender informs these experiences. Brigley regularly uses epistolaries to establish dialogues, often addressing or personifying women of myth, literature, and history, such as Leda, Edna Pontellier, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Gender violence and violence against animals are often central concerns, but what makes the collection particularly compelling is its refusal to let tragedy be the only note it sings; many of the poems also embrace the complicated wonders of motherhood, of devotion. Hand & Skull dazzled me with its agility and subtlety, its graceful inquiry into how gender, violence, myth, devotion and the natural world braid through our lives.' -- Amie Whittemore With Conquest, her fascinating second collection, the Welsh-born poet Zoe Brigley explores women's desires, dream and loves... Brigley deepens her expressive range as she explores diverse worlds and a shifting female cast... Via historical and mythic approaches, she highlights the vastness and intensity of women's desire, as well as the delicacy... The formal variety of Conquest serves Zoe Brigley's imaginative quest well, and includes, for instance, the prose poem, the list poem, and a variation on the double sestina. Yet the collection is without ostentation, and poems such as "The Love of a Husband" ("Because he never, ever hesitated./ Because when she shuts a window, he opens a door.") and the intricate "The Blue Rose", in memory of her English grandfather, are as heartfelt as they are beautifully judged. -- Moniza Alvi * PBS Bulletin * Exploring sexuality and politics with imaginative subtlety, Conquest is a book about pursuit and capture and the things that elude us in the chase... What seems to interest Brigley most about pursuit is what is evaded in the chase. Her poems are full of references to the lost and the untouchable... This is a beautifully disconcerting collection, intelligent in its treatment of its themes. -- Helen Mort * Magma *