“There’s a time in the life of a poet as a maker of poems, if he or she is going to become more than just good, when the voice of one’s second self fully emerges, distilling and orchestrating the poet’s concerns, while simultaneously infusing them with an inner melody—a music that reaches and satisfies both ear and mind. This is to say that Laure-Anne Bosselaar, with her wonderful third book, A New Hunger, has become more than just good. It’s an occasion to mark and to celebrate.

“Jacques Maritain says that he’d like poetry ‘to turn self-awareness into a superior sort of simplicity,’ and this is what, page after page, Bosselaar does. From the long poem that begins the collection and the ambitious sonnet squence that follows it, to almost any of the shorter lyrics, she shows a masterful control of pacing and tone. And all of the poems feel necessary, embodied. She’s written a book of urgent meditations, which places her already good work on a new level. I love what she’s done.” —Stephen Dunn

REVIEWS & COMMENTS

“Bosselaar collects many New York moments in this book because the moods of this collection are, like New York, always in transit, always fleeting. Chance encounters (an overheard cell phone conversation, a familiar name called out on the subway platform, a respite on a public bench overlooking the Hudson) become serendipitous opportunities for reflection and for holding on to the value of the ephemeral…. This book is a treasure, and an appropriate keepsake as we bid adiós to 2007 and begin 2008, as we stand between the old yearnings and the new, as we take stock of our fortunes, and tuck away thoughts about our misfortunes.“ —Roberto Gonzalez, Poetry magazine

“Memory, that great distiller of significance, is no less important for Laure-Anne Bosselaar, whose third book recalls self-centered parents and nightmarish experiences at a convent school in her native Belgium. Whereas Harrington writes to preserve, Bosselaar writes, as she variously puts it, ‘to let go’ to be ‘done with it’; but both deal with family, loss, and the threat of oblivion…. Bosselaar’s best situations poroke awareness and often have Proustian triggers. She is brilliant at transitions, film-like cuts from present to past…” —Peter Makuck, The Hudson Review

“Bosselaar, for whom English is a second language, has tuned her poetry to the perfect pitch. There’s not a word out of place, and the work retains a dreamy beauty to it, somewhat removed from the strum und drang of ordinary life, while still remaining a part of it.” —M.C. Bruce, Small Press Review

"It is no unkindness to say that irony is the compliment poetry pays to history. When the impulse to sincerity is pickled in experience, it becomes ripe for equivocations, puns, rhymes: all devices of ambivalence. A New Hunger, Laure-Anne Bosselaar's third collection, gets under way with the long-ago family catastrophe readers will recall from her first English collection, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: her banishment, as a young girl, to a nunnery. That parents connived in such an irresponsible deed is something that has been the object of a life's contemplation. It is not entirely unlike the situation of political writers who find the tragic suddenly fallen within their grasps long before the maturation dates that await all. Thanks to swift injustice, careers are unlocked, enabled.

The poet of A New Hunger tracks the continual aftershocks of that seismic event in brimming speech ("you went about your life without me"), ambivalent recollections ("that is all he needs—to remember the same"), and plain old double entendres:

    that's what I sold my mother's
    bed for. The one she died in. Sold it
    for a song.
                                                      ("Garage Sale")

Yet her intelligence is such that she is in fact ambivalent about ambivalence, conflicted about multivalence, and hesitant about repetition, so often outed as mere sameness. After all, love makes us rethink the drag of duplications, for the acts of love are, more often than not, acts of repetition. To step away from love's rituals is to become, in a sense, a willing participant in time, which, like a mighty river, swirls into history. Yet, just as the impulse to tame the clock doesn't stop, neither does the act of making poems. Considering that painstaking craft invites the very pain it seeks to control, Bosselaar registers the distance between her abandonment and the present with consistency and patience. Hers is a wound that figures in the gap between Europe and the U.S. At the same time, way more time passes than does space, but since neither is finite, this passing is like a great treasury expenditure, not something petty, not easily dispensed."—David Rigsbee, The Cortland Review