Subterranean

"Jill Bialosky slips Persephone’s pomegranate seeds into her own poet’s hand, then dives deep in Subterranean, locating fragments of girlhood and womanhood to assemble into a mythic underworld collage. If Beatrice herself were a suburban American girl who preceded Dante on his journey, these lyrics might be what she would tell us. You never get to heaven without the descent, as she, the Greek gods, and Jill Bialosky know very well–and we come to know through this alluring, surprising second volume of poems, where this poet comes into her own."
–Molly Peacock


"These wonderful poems call to us at first with their lyric surfaces. But the music of their language is really thin ice and not far underneath is the dark, chill power of the book’s true themes: sexuality, regret, the loss of children, the tainting of childhood, the nature of erotic pain. It is rare that a reader can be enchanted and endangered at the same time. This is a book of splendid and disturbing ambition."

–Eavan Boland


"Bialosky takes certain essentialities–spring and winter, suffering and desire, the surface life and the sweetly subtle pull of the life below–and makes them achingly local. The poems in SUBTERRANEAN reveal one woman’s psychic territory, lucidly and passionately mapped."
–Kim Addonizio



"Jill Bialosky’s second book of poems, SUBTERRANEAN, is an advance in psychic depth and expressive eloquence beyond her distinguished THE END OF DESIRE. Her new work fully establishes her voice: poignant, perilous, overwhelmingly aware of the extent to which our lives, inner and outer, are deflected by contingency, and by drives of love and death that govern us."
–Harold Bloom