Nancy Botkin’s poetry speaks with a clear, unsentimental voice to issues of family, memory, and the breakdown and re-assimilation of both. One experiences her poems as an almost palpable embodiment of image, sense, and sound. Her work expresses a great unity of emotion and intellect, embracing a clear and transcendent universality, savoring the excruciating detail of the here and now.
—Mike Amato, poet and visual artist
In Nancy Botkin’s stirring lyric sequence, In Waves, the world is split down the center of what is, and what could be. Then language itself, the cavalry of the imagination, rides in to attempt to save the day, by creating romantic fictions that supplant the past. In this, the sequence succeeds some of the time; but the poems are so urgently rendered, so darkly funny (even surreal), so clever in their use of personae (third and first person are both present here as agents of the self), that the struggle itself becomes Botkin’s victory. One wants to say these poems are epigrammatic, but each short lyric swells on the page and in the mind. The deeper we read into this work the clearer it becomes the implications of reality’s tougher truths, and hard-fought realizations of the self are what we were after all along. “I couldn’t get enough,” Botkin’s speaker says, of having a body, of remembering everything, of living; but what a joy now to rise above it all in language, to hold experience up to the light, to fail so gorgeously at changing the past while succeeding so absolutely at making it all worthwhile.
—David Dodd Lee