selah

• John Toone Debut Swift, Startling

Invigorating and alive to the risk and play of language, "starving for the undivided attention, a vacant lot," [John Toone]'s poems seek an attentiveness in form and content: "tell me something / I don't already know / in a different way. Fluid and musical, [Croll]'s poems lullaby the domestic, pacing and rocking in frustration and awe the walls and expanses of the birthing body and its "blood cliched" terrain: "I know there is no language / for what I want to say no language/ for mother and child that hasn't been washed and rinsed and spun." Aching for that "definable point / on the body's drifting map," to elude "each sharp / snapshot over exposed in sentiment," the writing is strongest when it pauses to address what is really at stake -- that words won't stick to her slippery subjec...

... and Bible passages into an existential "Selah," a hymnal shout-out to the muffle of earbudded, i...

• Winnipeg Free Press
• October 01, 2009

• Singing the praises of a new hymn book: ten years to create, worth every minute (Common praise).

... dealing with the typesetting company, Selah Publishing Co., in Kingston, N.Y. "It was very fru...

• Anglican Journal
• Vol. 125 Nbr. 1, January 1999