Whenever I see a poem by Angie Estes I prepare myself for serious delight. Her timing and her ever-uninhibited instinct for poetic shape are the triumphs of a first-rate musical intelligence. Angie Estes is Fred Astaire and Ginger too: backwards in high heels, forward on rollerskates, never have classy and sexy been better matched.
- Linda Gregerson
. . a brilliant and intellectually dazzling investigation of the often unstable relationship between language and experience. These heart-breaking and inventive poems negotiate the oscillations of event and memory in order to reveal the delicate and highly filigreed interweaving—in our lives—of action, meditation, and utterance. Beauty and insight spill off every page.
— David St. John
Angie Estes takes very alert art and wakes it up all over again. Out of wonderful sliding sound relationships and torqued-up rhythms, out of histories as vivid as they are diverse, she creates a present moment in which we realize that Giotto and Le Corbusier are, and always have been, contemporaries—our contemporaries—for great art always happens in the present, and Estes’ work is no exception. It’s now.
— Cole Swensen
Angie Estes has recently created some of the most beautiful verbal objects on the planet.
—Stephanie Burt, Boston Review
This is a poetry of style, elegance, and fresh surprise, for the ear and the eye, the heart and the mind. It reminds me why I read.
- Langdon Hammer
Stephanie Burt reviews PAROLE in The Yale Review: