Cover art by Stephen Croeser
Cover design by Robert Drummond
VESTIGIAL
April, 2013
Winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize 2012
Judge: Lynn Emanuel
“[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
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Vestigial whirls around a powerful magnetic center where particles—or vestiges—of now-living or lost worlds spin themselves. This poet’s imagination is the fiery magnetism that revivifies the word-hoarde through these dazzling etymological flashes—ancient and new embodiments of knowledge, science, history—in the paradise furnace of poetry. The velocity of the author’s insights stuns the reader: we follow, bewitched, into synaptical leaps that seem impossible to sustain, yet are sustained and unstoppable. Vestigial is a virtuoso performance, learned in the extreme, yet also eloquently empathetic. “Unfold your hands, / fall a/part” she writes. And we open the page and fall a/part—then are remade, wholly.
—Carol Muske-Dukes
A scintillating debut. Starzinger’s sensuous intelligence conjures a fresh, irresistible music rooted equally in obscure etymologies and current events. “You could say: I’m going to trust myself. And it will become / part of me,” she writes amidst the “pits, flutes, [and] runnels” of language, and then “Quick, here’s Blanchot.” English is both “scatter” and “trail” in this wordscape, a “tickle” and “what we call the angel’s share.” “Such is the pulse / at the table under the conversation” while the rich feast of this startling collection lasts.
—G.C. Waldrep
Like the family of peregrine falcons nesting on top the Verrazano Bridge in “Arachne,” these poems find their home amidst the high-speed currents and contingencies of contemporary life. Yet they maintain a vantage that appears almost to rise beyond time. It’s hard to remember the last book of poems in which emotion and intellect, public conscience and private passion, linguistic precision and go-for-broke riskiness were as successfully fused—even down to the syllables themselves—as they are in Page Starzinger’s Vestigial. This is a superb, enduring collection of poems.
—Peter Campion
Poems from Vestigial
Barrow Street: “Collectio,” “Squander”
Colorado Review: “Aphasia”
Fence: “Radiance”
Kenyon Review: “Alpha Protein”
Literary Imagination: “Unaccounted For”
Volt: “Lyms of”
Women’s Studies Quarterly: “A Karstic”