PRACTICAL WATER
Brenda Hillman
Wesleyan University Press, 2009
If you are ever on the verge of despair about the way American culture is drenched in mass communication trivia and academic irrelevance, read Brenda Hillman’s latest collection of poetry and rejoice. Here is a woman alive to the contradictions and obscenities of modern American power, who can notice the smallest details of life and rejoice in them, who sanctifies the waters of life even as she watches them being destroyed by the alleged progress of capital, and who thereby becomes a contemporary Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov, updated and refined through her own unique sensibility and sensitivity to rhythm and paradox.