—The Boston Review
Photo by Daniel Dorsa
Page Hill Starzinger's second poetry collection, Vortex Street (2020), was short-listed for the Grand Prize in Poetry by the Eric Hoffer Award Committee. Her first book, Vestigial (2013), won the Barrow Street Book Prize, selected by Lynn Emanuel. Both are from Barrow Street Press, NYC. Her chapbook, Unshelter (2009), won the Noemi contest, chosen by Mary Jo Bang. Poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Fence, West Branch, Pleiades, Volt, and others. Starzinger was Copy Director at Aveda for almost twenty years, and co-authored A Bouquet from the Met (Abrams, 1998). She was a Peter Taylor Fellow at Kenyon Review Summer Workshops in 2014 and 2018. She taught a craft class at The Frost Place, A Center for Poetry & the Arts as a Special Guest in 2013. Starzinger lives in New York City.
VORTEX STREET
2020
Last swelling of the uterus, last circuit of a childhood home, last flare of recognition on a father’s face: “It is most certainly the end of something,” writes the poet in these pages. And upon that unblinking apprehension builds an edifice of praise. We love the world because we are doomed to lose it, and nowhere is that love more eloquently manifest than in poems like those of Vortex Street.
—Linda Gregerson
Confirming the truth that grief is the growing-pot of beauty, Vortex Street mourns the passage of time in the forms of loss of youth and youthful dreams, dying parents, omnipresent knowledge of the world’s violence, the past enshrined in a house for sale. Page Hill Starzinger, acute and excitingly associative, articulates these complex sorrows with unflinching originality. These poems remind the reader what it feels like to live in the moment as moments inexorably move on; they will stay with you.
—Kathleen Ossip
VESTIGIAL
2013
“[F]ragments—my/specialty,” writes Page Hill Starzinger in her compelling first book, Vestigial, and, indeed, the title implies the book itself is a remnant. But if Vestigial is fragmentary, (“leavinges / and fragmentes . . . etched and eroded . . . ”) it is a flood of fragments. This is a vivid, dynamic, and muscular collection whose poems seem able to sweep everything into themselves—from the etymology of early English to the percentage of homes in Delhi without clean water. Yet the poems are neither anarchic nor hectic. In fact, in counterpoint to their energy, there is a beautiful, almost grave and measured cadence to this work as Starzinger, like Penelope, weaves and unweaves. As she writes, “I keep trying to shape a story. I keep disappearing.” Vestigial is a marvelous debut.
—Lynn Emanuel
UNSHELTER
2009
As in love with the etymologies of words as with life itself (and art), the poems in Unshelter leap and dazzle like fireflies of memory, sensation, and history. Page Hill Starzinger’s poetry scintillates with brilliant associative links and yet never loses sight of the often painful truths that inhabit us and our world. Here is a mature voice that has lived on the border land and brought us back the twin gifts of a rich word hoard married to a truly cosmopolitan consciousness.
—Sharon Dolin
The New Yorker: “Helianthus”
Bennington Review: “My Body Knows Its Limits”
Volt: “Yonder” “Ah, Ersatz” “E, Ellipse”
Laurel Review: “One Way of Looking at It” “Washington Square Park Jesus Returns”
American Poetry Review: “My Unborn Child Says to Me” “Galaxy Filament”
Kenyon Review: “Specula” “Dive-bomb”
On The Seawall: “And: Still”
Fence: “Radiance”
Kenyon Review: “Alpha Protein”
Volt: “Lyms of”
Colorado Review: “Aphasia”
The Laurel Review: “Eucharist Nervosa”
TriQuarterly: “Charcoal Suite”
• August 19, 2023 Hudson Valley Writers Center Craft Class, Sleepy Hollow, NY
• May 15, 2023 Emma Willard School Reading, Troy, NY
• March 30, 2023 Grolier Book Shop Reading, Cambridge, MA
• October 3, 2022 Literati Reading, Ann Arbor, MI
• October 2, 2022 Lansing Poetry Club Reading, Lansing, MI
• June 13, 2021 Emma Willard School Alumnae Reunion Closing Ceremony
• June 2, 2021 The Hudson River Writers Center YouTube Reading
• April 15, 2022 Baker-Starzinger Writing Award Reading, UCM
• January 24, 2021 Lit Youngstown YouTube Reading and Conversation
• December 17, 2020 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books Poetry Reading
• December 13, 2020 Cultivating Voices Facebook Live Reading
• November 18, 2020 Bennington Writers Facebook Live Reading
• September 21, 2020 KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading with an introduction by Jason Schneiderman
• September 10, 2020 Magers & Quinn Facebook Live Reading
• June 2022 The New Yorker “Helianthus”
• June 2022 Volt Volume #26 “E, Ellipse,” “Ah, Erstaz,” “Yonder”
• June 2022 Laurel Review Issue 54.2 “One Way of Looking at It,” “Washington Square Park...”
• October 2020 Great River Review Review of Vortex Street
• October 2020 On The Seawall Interview with Page Hill Starzinger
• October 2020 West Branch Issue 93 “I, Eclipse,” “Ewe, Et Al.”
• May 2020 On The Seawall Review of Ensō by Shin Yu Pai
• April 2020 On The Seawall Review of Vortex Street
• April 2020 New Pages Review of Vortex Street
• April 2020 The Maynard “Stem of Old French Criestre, To Grow,” “Of Stinging Nettle”
• March 2020 Poetry Northwest “Contraction”
• March 2020 Plume Poetry 8, Print Edition “Parable”
• February 2020 Laurel Review “Frauen auf Baumen”
• January 2020 American Poetry Review “My Unborn Child Says to Me,” “Galaxy Filament”
• December 2019 Diode Poetry Journal “The Last Day We Were All Together”
• November 2019 On the Seawall Review of Doomstead Days by Brian Teare
• March 2015 Boston Review Review of Vestigial
• March 2014 Plume Interview with Page Hill Starzinger
