G

"In a debut of prose poems that approach language by turns as abstract or as deeply representational, interdisciplinary artist and writer Russo chronicles a desire for calm and unattachment in the face of the details of a life—a volatile relationship, the labor of gardening, a “Nervous disorder.” ... The poems on the right-facing pages feel as if they have fallen from the spaces in the more fragmented poems of the left. As Russo writes, “Some things drop down into what space is cleared for,” before revising this sentiment when she writes later, “What we continue to clear is G.” Readers will likely find the primary pleasures of this book in this tension, as philosophy emerges from fracture and the poems gesture toward but never perform wholeness." 

"‘G is a garden and seems simple,’ we’re told early on in this disarming, charming, and alarming book. With its text cleaved in two across right and left pages, G reads like an exchange between garden plots and the gardener’s journal—neither of which remains simple or simply wholesome from up close, when you’re in the weeds. It’s this up-closeness that rewards, transforming an air of levity into an air of suspension, or suspense: who or what is this G, really? (Who or what, finally, isn’t?) Russo’s writing, a peculiar marriage of compression and splay, embeds a germinal weirdness in the fallow page, and waits. The results are like certain mushrooms fruiting, unassuming to look at but potent with magic: ‘a hindrance open.’"
—Anna Moschovakis