Undone
Finalist, Green Rose Prize
Praise
Maxine Scates’ poems have a profoundly human and humane character, ranging with their tender exactitude from dogs and horses to a drunken father, assorted strangers, and odds-defyingly dazzling giants. Scates moves nimbly through memory, music, literature, feelings, and landscapes to arrive with apparent ease at the unexpected but true heart of the matter. Undone is a fearless collection, or rather it’s full of fear but stares it down fiercely to make beauty palpable, pain bearable, and to offer wisdom that’s intimate and welcome.
Barbara Ras
By brave and honest recognition, coupled with a deft ability to glide between realms of perception tripped open by memory and emotion, Maxine Scates reconstructs a life undone by the brokenness of family, friends, and self. Nuanced, mysterious, intimate. Beautiful poems.
Dorianne Laux
A new book by Maxine Scates is always a notable event and Undone—a book notable for its skill, range, and depth of feeling—is no exception. While the language is rich and various the poems are also admirable in the way they confront everyday life with a clear and steady eye, weaving the past and present together seamlessly and giving us views of American society usually ignored in contemporary poetry. This is clearly one of the finest books of this or any other year and deserves a wide audience and our deep appreciation as readers.
Vern Rutsala
Reviews
Undone will remind some readers of Philip Levine in its consideration of blue-collar existence. Like Levine, Scates may want to find lyricism in that existence, but instead of lionizing day-in, day-out physical labor and the irreparable damage it does to the male psyche, she records the damage done to the families, and specifically the girls. We know how, in James Wright’s words, some boys in working-class families may “grow suicidally beautiful” and “gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.” But what of the girls? Written in elegaic verse that’s honed to tough, honest sentiment, Undone derives its originality from Scates’ gutsy look into herself, a female witness who has examined her own past in order to tell us what happens to girls—and how they survive the fall into womanhood.
Kevin Clark, The Georgia Review
These poems skirt on unconsciousness while remaining grounded in every important detail—every tractor, every dead relative, every drink taken or not taken. As such, she is able to paint an extremely wide canvas, which is necessary because her subject matter is the vast concept of what makes us who we are and how we can only gain privy into who we are by starting everywhere at once—beginning, middle and end—and unraveling everything we know and don’t know until at last we stand in the truth of having been. . . undone.
Michael Rosenbaum, Front Porch Journal
The speaker’s sadness is not limited to her father. In fact, her own grief seems to make her capable of bearing the grief of others. In “Blue Boxcars,” she says, “So maybe it’s what grief makes of us, / the instruments of its sad music, the way the view / out any window sometimes makes perfect sense,/ is greater than all its parts.”
Erin Feldman, Rattle
Undone aptly describes the poems in this collection; they are poems of depth and density, stories told by a master storyteller, connecting the incidentals in life to the more profound.
Renee Emerson, New Pages