Megan Burns’s review of Claire Hero’s Dollyland is filled with so many killer phrases and perceptions, the review would be worth reading even if Dollyland was just an idea rather than a physical book.
Here are just a few of our favorite sentences in Burns’s review:
Claire Hero’s newest collection Dollyland features 15 [prose] poems about that once dearly- beloved clone of clones, Dolly the Sheep, and if Dolly the Sheep opened a theme park, Hero could outfit the House of Horrors with verses such as these….
[Hero’s] language rests hoofed and cloven as she takes us in hand to wander in the bones and muscles of that domesticated wilderness of the animal song….
…inhabiting the dark underbelly of a thing found first not in nature but in the lab…..
Science, religion, politics and belief came to the forefront in the unlikely form of a sheep, a wooly being through which we worked out our dark need to control and contain the shape of life and death….
Hero lets the wound stay open, she allows the reader to fall into the abyss, a bit terrible and also bitten down into the mouthfuls that she shoves in repeatedly. In this place, we are the beast, we are the faulty construction, we are the ones supplying the wool against the cold night and we are the ones choking on how much we swallow….
Click to read the full review.
Read more about, or purchase, Claire Hero’s chapbook, Dollyland.