WHAT THEY'RE SAYING ABOUT HUMAN NATURE . . .

THOMAS LUX: "Alice Anderson is a gifted, intense, lucid, and absolutely fearless young poet. HUMAN NATURE marks a splendid debut."

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY: (starred review) "Beware, all who enter here." Anderson's remarkable first book, winner of the 1994 Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, is like an outcropping of hell - the reader is compelled by fascination and horror to keep reading. These are poems of paternal incest and complicity: the brother brought into the sister's room to watch her sexual activity with the father; the mother talking about it with the daughter as if "we're in this together"; the woman grown, betrayed, enraged, and convinced that "no man will ever adore me that way again." Dedicated to Sharon Olds, these poems bear her influence: the unflinching look at a difficult reality, the rich attention to physical detail, the rush of overwhelming experience, the aesthetic control. The book's last line-"It's the human's nature to survive, welcome to the living"-which also gives the book its grim and hopeful title, celebrates survival. Anderson's life force is implicit in the language throughout these poems, objective, exact, charged with an emotional force given only to those who have been to hell and returned to tell the tale.

MARK DOTY: "Alice Anderson is willing to investigate the darkest of answers. Though her stories are so harrowing that we do not believe there is a possibility of rescue or escape, Anderson's ferocious map of the past also points the way out. From the consolations of naming and shaping her story, from looking unflinchingly at the unbearable, arises a remarkable sense of hope. 'Welcome,' she tells us and herself, 'to the living.'"

BOSTON REVIEW OF BOOKS: "Anderson is the Brett Easton Ellis of poetry." (not sure what I think of that, except that it's pretty damn funny . . .)

GARRETT HONGO: "These poems are shocking and brave, relentless in their obsessive power. The poet here is someone new in American letters . . . a passionate heroic woman confronting the demon of her past even as she, not without moments of caustic irony, seeks a redemptive experience in sexual encounters. Even as we might be beguiled by the tough, seemingly pitiless bluster in tone and dramatic situations of these poems, we do not fail to be moved by the battered consolational impulse in the woman who wrote them."

LIBRARY JOURNAL: This first collection of poetry compulsively retells a tale of childhood incest. A father's continual rape of his daughter is juxtaposed against the daughter's childhood landscape, both interior and exterior. The result is a nursery horror story that moves from childhood into the inevitable violent relationships of adulthood. Anderson's depiction of incest is particularly disturbing owing to the abused daughter's complicity: "He'd rub the square of whiskers he left/unshaved for me against the soft skin of my cheek and I'd be sure I was/the good child, that I deserved to be his girl, his favorite." Other scenes include a brother's bloody childhood accident, preadolescent sex games, and attempts at conventional sex. Ultimately, we want to hear more about not the villain father but the elusive mother, "safe in her long white gown/with the dark brown patch shining through."