The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis

Poetry. Fiction. Everything in these gathered pieces--vatic as poetry, confidential as prose--is a music broadcast from the imminent future, say, five minutes from now. Here, even memory has been subtly, irreversibly changed by events just now underway. The music is troubled and troubling. It is certainly true.--Donald Revell

Balancing outward and inward looking, playfulness and vulnerability, strange intimacy and gauzy disconnection, Joanna Penn Cooper's THE ITINERANT GIRL'S GUIDE TO SELF-HYPNOSIS builds a moody and tender ladder. These lyric shorts recall the New York School with their arrays of noticings and exultancies and knobbly, vivid particulars, yet they also feel wholly fresh and surprising, and of Cooper's own nimble and provocative making. This is a wonderful collection.--Paula McLain