“She holds a handful of earth— / she must say it to understand it.” This scene, from a poem that engages Rainer Maria Rilke as well as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, is a gorgeously emblematic and enigmatic moment in Trish Hopkinson’s Footnote. This collection is obsessed with the miracle of words and the mouths that say them, the bodies that carry them out and back in, deliciously, deliriously. From Emily Dickinson to Amiri Baraka to David Lynch to Sylvia Plath to Pablo Neruda to Janis Joplin, these poems perform erasures, palimpsests, collages, ventriloquisms, haunted monologues, dreams in which the physical dances with the metaphysical so that the stormy dream of language can enter us. And then we see how “we are driven by our own ceremonies, / by whirling words.” Hopkinson understands that the best conversation is a transformation, in which the words one has inherited are reinvented. Footnote reminds us that the act of saying is something we may never fully understand—and that is cause for whirling joy. 

–Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

 

 

"What elegant control and preciseness in Trish Hopkinson’s chapbook, Footnote. These response poems pay homage to the greats—artists, singers, filmmakers and other writers like Amiri Baraka, Octavio Paz, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ai, Janis Joplin, and Pablo Neruda. In “A Room Made of Poetry,” a found poem from Laura Hamblin’s The Eyes of a Flounder, Hopkinson writes: “Here you can wait,/ with desire, with/ roots exposed/ for an open womb. That heart-balm/ as hope./ The raw bent/— a bowl of fruit/  in a language I never knew . . .” This is exactly the feeling these poems evoke: in the rhythm of response and found poems, and forms like reverse snowballs and erasures, Hopkinson covers so much ground, giving readers a taste of art from across the centuries and the world. Footnote must simply be savored and re-read."

 

–Nicole Rollender, author of Louder Than Everything You Love and Ghost Tongue