To a New Era

Book excerpt: Joanna Fuhrman's sixth poetry collection is a fearless blend of the real and the surreal, the political and the personal, all with the marks of her own kind of accelerated dizzying style that nevertheless brings you along with it. "Fuhrman's got her own funky brand of blended surrealism and fabulism going on in To a New Era. The poems in this tour de force offer funicular modes of language transport, making it a dizzying, dazzling joy to be a commuter on this collection (see 'Adjunct Commuter' poems). Sentience abounds; metamorphoses are in the poetry's plasma. Formal poems emit a flirty, contemporary spirit of rebellion. Political poems are pissed, hilarious, iconoclastic, in debate with language's complicated connotations, histories, and alternate histories. In To a New Era, Fuhrman toasts to the cyclones that blow through our days and our nights. This collection is one storm of words that will bowl you over! " -Martine Bellen