Her Familiars

by Jane Satterfield

Poetry. HER FAMILIARS is Jane Satterfield's third book of poetry. This collection winds its way through civilization, history, and popular culture like a newly imagined animal and becomes a "familiar" to every reader. Kevin Prufer had this to say about "Jane Satterfield brings an astonishing range of subjects to HER FAMILIARS, handling them with keen intelligence, musical intricacy, and tonal dexterity. Here, she tells of a child's encounter of tragedy through a poetry recitation, or the life of an exemplary (and little known) woman ceramic artist, or the collapse of human communities through history (concluding, disconcertingly, with the vanishing of bees today). Jane Satterfield's poems are intimate, graceful, and brilliant, composed around issues of social and political importance. Reading them, I feel I have made a friend whose company I enjoy and whose insight, wit and commitment I greatly admire. These are terrific poems."

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2012

Reviews

[Amanda Corbin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jane Satterfield’s Her Familiars compiles observations of our culture and history but also entwines consideration of the personal and familiar.
The collection of twenty-eight poems in four sections includes an epigraph that defines the word familiar and its uses, past and current, as “Pertaining to one’s family life… an officer of the Inquisition… an intimate friend or associate… a familiar spirit, a demon or evil spirit supposed to attend a call.” Just as varied as the uses of “familiar” are the subjects explored in this collection. With a flexibility and deft command of multiple forms, Satterfield finds depth as she navigates the familiar in our world.
See full review at http://www.jmwwjournal.com/

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's notable, right away, in Satterfield's latest, is the range of the book--how much history it is willing to take on, how it oscillates between pop cultural and high cultural allusions, how formally diverse it is. Featuring two, very long poems written in lyric sections among two sections of shorter lyric poem, the book announces its ambitions on the page. It takes big risks; it delivers big rewards.

[Jennifer]

I particularly enjoyed the poems, "Why I Won't Attend My Sister-in-Law's 'For Your Pleasure' Party," (thank Heaven for decent, well-bred, classy and brave women such as she!), Ms. Satterfield's sobering verses on England's most famous witch trial, and the delightful, funky sestina, "Endsville."
"