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""This is a feminine poetry, marvelous, tough, and unrelenting..." Treadwell subverts and exposes unconsciously internalized
stereotypes and voices, breaking language down, and then
releasing the reader to make her own understanding. The result isn't narrative--and is not always even mood or atmosphere, but a series of rising challenges that relax into moments of clear beauty."—Maureen Thorson, Boog City

"Review of Cornstarch Figurine by Charles Alexander"
"I think Elizabeth Treadwell must love Jane Austen, early Romantic novels, and possibly even contemporary ones, Shirley Temple, and maybe even soap operas. Otherwise, how could one fill a poem with such phrases as "crystal dined at court," "daresay bygone prince," "ruined women," "a girl's peekaboo," "the alderman's newspaper flaming," "nervous christian mercy," and more, as she does in a poem titled "Oona Thompson," whose epigraph is from Beverly Dahlen and reads, in a blind way the legend is moving. Maybe that's one thing you find in Treadwell's work, a sense that everything is always moving, and while it may have all the elements of... More > legend, it's rather blind and can't quite be a legend. We are rather blind as readers and can't quite grasp control of what we are reading, and that is what keeps us at "the banquet.

"In this book there are bridge parties, palace arcades, and the remains of the bodies of ladies. There are goddesses and daisies and an apple-jade dancing floor. And there are also sisters, and sisters, and sisters, and "the mother the mother the mother," so that, despite what I have said about being thrown out of the poem all the time because of the not-quite-joined bric-a-brac, there is a feeling of intimacy, of a deeply personal poem under or within what we are reading. There are poems dedicated to sisters, and there may well be codes we can not entirely recover. But again, I don't think that matters, rather I have the sense that the meaning-always-slightly-beyond-the-edge-of-where-we-are, is what keeps us on that edge, reading, listening, seeking."

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