Andrea Selch

“Startling is a book of poems that ventures simultaneously out into contemporary life with all its ambiguity, complexity and ‘startling’ freshness, and back into the public and personal past with all its trauma and shattered hopes. In poems that are by turns heart wrenching and witty, alive with history and alert to the here and now, burdened by memory and flowering with new life, with all the incorrigible longings that new life brings, Andrea Selch is drawn to those transitional moments when ‘the August-baked and winter-deadened dooryard/swells with clover,’ moments when it is possible to re-imagine ourselves and our loves in rich and marvelous ways. Startling is a fabulous, wise, funny, somber book, a book to cherish.”

“Love is difficult to voice because the emotion is so nuanced and fluctuating. Here Andrea Selch gives us the right words ‘definite and permanent’ that bespeak our silent hearts, startlingly.”

“Andrea Selch’s Startling nudges, plunges us into a reassessment of time. In her finely crafted, compelling poems, we find that time wounds as often as it heals, that it punishes us for ignoring its passage by inexorably passing. She shows us time as the glue and the wedge in intimate relationships; she rescues it from abstraction through lines that yoke it to bodies—growing, reacting, consuming, wasting. Selch moves as fluidly between humor and tenderness, between exuberance and ache, as our lives do. She plays the language like a musical instrument: read these poems aloud.”

“Like Shockley, Andrea Selch is a poet whose orientation one might align with the School of Quietude. But there is nothing very quiet about Andrea Selch. Her poems, even the most conventional ones, show a wonderfully rich vocabulary & a real sense of how tease out the tension between syntax and the line. The first stanza of her Carolina Wren Press volume, Succory, shows her ability to generate & control complex effects:

 Slow, the green came, weaning
 the white bud from its tight swaddle of leaves.
 Below, the slim stalk hardened;
 each evening, stark against the muggy pane,
 its veins drew closer in and spined like bark,
 and you moved about the room, oblivious.

I hear this stanza as an extended strategy, deploying vowels to invoke responses not otherwise articulatable in words. The lo combination of the first word sets it up: we’ll find it again in both Below and closer, their combined reiterations preparing us for the o-rich final line, and especially that key sonic reversal of the phonemes that shows up in oblivious. To ensure the effect, she uses long e and a sounds in the earlier lines, plus those two bright long i sounds: tight & spined. As the stanza develops, the dominance of the vowels in the first lines opens up to enable the sharp contrast of the k in stalk, stark and most importantly bark (whose end-of-line power is accented by the foreshadowing in that same line at the beginning of closer). Thus to be presented at last with a line entirely governed by different uses of o has an impact as powerful as being thrown into a swimming pool. You feel immersed in this very different kinesthetic environment.”http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_archive.html