[In Instructions to the Double, Under Stars, and On Your Own, Tess Gallagher] consistently reaches into fresh, often startling reservoirs of experience and comes up with original, lucid verses.
I am most impressed by the wide variety of subjects that Gallagher has investigated. "Two Stories" is about the murder of her uncle in 1972: it compares someone else's lurid account of the killing with her own perceptions…. In "Breasts," she dates the end of her childhood rapport with boys to the day her mother interrupted the children's roughhouse and demanded that the little girl cover her "swart nubbins." "A Poem in Translation" defines the additional violence that a translator does to a persecuted Russian poet. All the poems are written in single, distinctive voice, which, if uniformly humorless, is quiet enough to accommodate differing levels of tone and sharp enough to carry emotional urgency. One even hears this voice in the one poem in which Gallagher writes in the persona of her father…. The reader also hears it in her most difficult poems…. She is always successful in evoking her childhood. Here especially the images ring true and immediate…. Gallagher understands that the mind of a child works in ways that for want of a better word can be called poetic. (pp. 54-5)
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