Territory

Poetry. "If you focus on [Marks'] poems line by line and phrase by phrase, very often they turn out to be anything but calm. They turn out to be quite brilliant and quite insightful and sometimes quite reassuring but sometimes quite disturbing. I am tempted to compare them not only to other poets, but also to the work of painters and musicians. Claude Monet comes to mind, in fact, as does Nick Drake, let's say, in that you can think of them as beautiful background, but you can also think of them as terribly brilliant foreground. Marks, I think, looks more closely at familiar spaces and things than most of us can, and the more closely you look at her language the more you get out of it. And the more I read [her work], the warmer I feel about it, the more I see a range of emotion from gratitude to anger in those poems whose surfaces are so calm. And the more I read it the more I like it."--Stephanie Burt