Meddle English

REVIEWS

For a person relatively unversed in the particularities of her idiolectic, mixed languages, her poetic texts might read like computer code; but since the effort is meaningful, what of it? It points toward the last paradox, that despite her texts’ sophistication — which might seem to inaugurate strictly intellectual pleasures — when the texts enter into the reader’s ear and/or metaphorical bloodstream, the first clear pleasures are intuitive, those of sound, rhythm and cadence and the forever-alive performative dimension of speech. The delights are as alive (and personal) as language exists in the morning before you have re-coded it all into the Queen’s English, or the rational language of book-reviews, or even syntax itself.
—Matt Reeck, Jacket 2

She approaches language as a pliable medium, one whose rules, behaviors, and properties are constantly rediscovered in the process of her work. Meddle English reveals these discoveries and shows us a writer who understands fully the risks, pleasures, and possibilities of her art.
—Mary Wilson, Make

Bergvall turns ‘illegibility’ on its head: she insists on a poetics that is neither merely read nor impossible to read. Instead, Bergvall attempts to offer another way of being, necessarily multiple. This affords space for unknowing, for the unrecognizable, where political vision and perhaps even political intimacy and solidarity does not require immediate recognition within our normative configurations of the sensible and knowable.
—Rebecca Teich, The Poetry Project Newsletter

Love binds, love connects. And through Bergvall’s ongoing commitments, those bindings and connections are explored thoroughly and beautifully. Closing the trilogy, finding the last poem, contains a bit of heartache, a sighing wish for Bergvall to continue. But, in fact, I won’t be surprised if that’s indeed what happens, if Bergvall finds yet another extension to this ongoing work. As Alisoun says in the book’s final poem, “The era of ma tellings nat bygone, just bigonne.” As symbol, as voice, as voices, there is much yet to read, many more moments to listen.
—Greg Bem, Rain Taxi