New Reviews of In Which I Play the Runaway
You can read several online reviews of my second collection, In Which I Play the Runaway:
Los Angeles Review of Books "Hurt shows us, skillfully and strikingly, that the stories and archetypes which provide frameworks for our thinking, that build community across geographic and temporal boundaries, are also a subtle and deeply unsettling presence in what we once thought were private exchanges."
Columbia Poetry Review "Rochelle Hurt's poems seamlessly slip from one persona to another, regularly shifting contexts without compromising voice or disorienting the reader. It's a technique that imbues In Which I Play The Runaway with a certain kind of excitement: the frantic feeling of leaving somewhere, of abandoning something, of running from someone."
"In Which I Play the Runaway is an extended meditation on what it means to assert 'I' as a girl, as a woman, as a poet, and it is an unforgiving investigation into the consequences of this assertion."
Indiana Review "Rochelle Hurt’s second poetry collection, In Which I Play the Runaway, does more than summon narratives of origin and growth—the poems command another language with a new alphabet of 'boxcar beats,' of fluorescence, linoleum, of living inside 'this hissing kettle of a house.' In impossibly small spaces, Hurt demands the creation of another sight, reckoning with the speaker’s unflinching desires."
"This idea of narrative inheritance lies at the heart of this collection whose poems challenge accepted narratives about womanhood, fairy tales, movies, and family, always with an eye toward questioning the reflex to 'gulp down circumstance as fate.'”