New poetry by the author of Realm Sixty Four $14.00 Paper, 978-0-9818591-3-2 2009 • 80 pp. 5 1/2 x 7 1/2" •Reviews• •Excerpt• •About the Author•

By turns pained and playful, deceptively clear and transparently oblique, these poems show a will toward meaning that must find its way through the signs, superstitions, and provocations of language. The commonplace world is greedily dismembered and collected, brought home to wallpaper a constantly emptied interior—-of house, of body, of marriage, of idea. Is it a comfort, all this cutting and slipping? Is it poetic romp? Or does it follow the sorrow of everything else that falls apart and slips away? The poet won’t say, but the poems say yes, yes, and yes. —Susan Tichy 

The wildly whispered and often mind-blowing poems in Kristi Maxwell’s Hush Sessions go to the heart of the matter beneath one’s breath—that is, the experiences and perceptions beneath the breath of language itself—especially those bits of us that can’t quite withstand the volume of the loud light of day. With lyrical abandon and an inside-out attentiveness to the echoes and shadows of our most depth-charged particles, these poems blast off in every direction at once, ever mindful of the notion that to sing a song interestingly, one has not only to hear it as it is and as it might be, but also as it isn’t and won’t. Maxwell sings in deeply interesting—not to mention moving—ways: atmospheric, subversive, and gorgeously close. —Matt Hart

"A mysterious accumulation, Hush Sessions is an exploration and meditation. It is a circling of image and thought, pieces of narrative (he & she), which begins with superstition, but comes to represent an even more ominous and heartbreaking sorrow."
Read the Review from the University of Arizona Poetry Center

"Maxwell’s poems smoothly exist in multiple worlds at the same time, describing a bodily failure while engaging in linguistic play..."
Read the Review from New Pages

"The books linguistic wit along with the narrative and philosophical playfulness bring Stephen Burt’s newest book of criticism’s title to mind (Close Calls With Nonsense) but as he often argues in that book such close calls can bring us, as readers, closer to the chaotic world we live in and provide pleasure along the way. "
Read the Review from Arbutus

"There is a tremendous mind at work in these poems, a mind constantly engaged in its own game of question and answer, static and clarity."
Read the Review from Gently Read Literature