Intruder Hardcover - 2008 - 1st Edition

Media reviews

Praise for Intruder
 
“Jill Bialosky's powerful third book of poetry, Intruder, is sharply perceptive, reminding readers about the way life forces us to our knees while restoring us to our true selves.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“Jill Bialosky’s Intruder is a perfectly transparent esoteric poem.  Who is the speaker, who is the intruder?  We cannot know, although we know these figures intimately…Her volume is music, each note of the melody significant, including its silent breaks and endings replete with message and emotion… To experience in any art a new shock of the good, the beautiful, the terror, is a rare sweetness…In the last few years no book of poetry has so completely captivated me as Intruder.” —Willis Barnstone, New Letters
 
“[The poems] in Jill Bialosky’s Intruder are erotic dialogues. But this does not mean they are “just” love poems. Like Plato’s Phaedrus, [they] are as much speeches on love and desire as they are speeches on speech, on the possibility and limits of expression . . . Bialosky is the poet’s love poet, struggling as much with her own imagination and desire to write as with a real other.”—Kascha Semonovitch,  Kenyon Review
 
“[Bialosky’s] elusive, subtly erudite work as a poet transports her to another realm entirely…These are some of the most psychologically astute poems about being a mother, and especially about being the mother of a son, since Plath’s.” —Diann Blakely, Harvard Review
 
“Jill Bialosky’s third book of poems, Intruder, makes the writer’s (or artist’s) conflicts her central subject. [ It] is the accomplished work of a poet in mid-career, grappling with both the mystery and the will to embody it.” —Ron Slate.com
 
“Hypnotic . . . Dreamlike poems . . . energized by their own darkness.” —Library Journal

“These poems show both a storyteller’s gift for implicit narrative and a sophisticate’s sense of other arts . . . Bialosky’s book ends up . . . confirming her in her most serious of all her vocations: the setting down of a tumultuous inner life into clear, shared words.” —Publishers Weekly

“Gorgeous . . . what a rush these stormy poems of love, disruption, and resignation are, as intense and perfectly noted as violin concertos.” —Booklist

“Jill Bialosky’s Intruder is a powerful work that combines an inquiry into the depths of passion with the details of ordinary life -- a boy at baseball, a woman cutting sunflower stems. In this third collection, she has invented a mode for juxtaposing abstractions with moving images. She writes with urgency of the mysteries of art, which have a direct bearing on the joys and dangers of simply being alive. I read this book in wonder.”
–Grace Schulman