Exit, Civilian

We only imagine ourselves free. Idra Novey's stark, inventive poems hurtle forth with brash lyricism, forcing us to reflect on our roles as captives, alternate swinging open and slamming shut the prison doors. There is no work like this, no tales so beautiful and hurtful, no stanzas that bite this hard and linger this long.

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In Exit, Civilian, Idra Novey takes Vasko Popa’s ‘little box’ and morphs it into a ‘little prison.’ The sweetness of the name ‘little prison’ draws us in, and Novey tracks her discomfort with the justice system with surprising and illuminating tenderness. Novey has taught for the Bard Prison Initiative—one poem zooms in on the poignant detail of the crumpling of a wedding dress as it moves into and out of the prison, another imagines a mother named ‘Trial’ giving birth to a child, ‘Verdict.’ I finished this book with these words still in my head: ‘Do you want to hear more / About the little prison / Have you noticed / It is everywhere.’ These poems truly change what and how we see.

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‘Enter an apple / And come out the teeth marks / In its yellowed core,’ writes Idra Novey. In this spare, remarkable collection, she harnesses and transforms prison experience into a visionary exploration where boundaries dissolve, and we find ourselves transformed.

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[T]he book reveals superb acts of attention, by a writer whose reliable moral sense matches her first-rate ear.

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Novey’s work has always had a subversive quality, exploring unsanctioned facets of identity, and her discoveries here are just as fresh as in her first collection, if more openly dangerous and political. . . . [Her] images and scenes are meticulously constructed, crystalline, inviting us into a parallel world that reflects back the darker parts of our own.

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A meditation on imprisonment, using surrealism as a tool to understanding the real; this is a smart and immaculately crafted book that deserves and rewards you.

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The prisons, courthouses, and hideaways featured in Novey's National Poetry Series winner are very real, but we don't encounter so much bars, barbs, and barbed wire as metaphysical shrinkage and change. . . . Startling.

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[Novey's] modes vary from flashes of anecdote to surreal narrative, from prose to brief lyrics to long-lined poems. The effect is one of an extended reach toward concretions, routines and environments that won't yield to mere wishes to understand or change them. . . . In Exit, Civilian, the thing is the prison, intractably present—and freedom, more than simply a life outside a jail, comprises an infinite speculation on the meaning of itself. The tonal gives way to the atonal, the fuzzy.