Apparition Wren

"The poems in Apparition Wren are sometimes sensual, sexual, almost rawly empathic to the loneliness and suffering of the characters she writes about (look at Mud Pie Underworld, Butcher's Wife); sometimes Alsop's poems are less narrative, and still beautifully candid and strange."
— Jean Valentine

 “One half prayer book, one half book of prophecy, one half inner almanac, Maureen Alsop’s Apparition Wren truly overflows with a generous, deeply felt lyricism, a ‘dappled song’ bursting forth from the mind’s ‘delirious dark.’ The seemingly calm lyrical pulse at the center of her poems vibrates outward to include a wild menagerie of objects, landscapes, and selves. Suddenly, each poem reveals itself as a contact point where the sacred and profane change skins, exchange a weird glance, and then fall back into the book’s throttling hum. Subtle and spontaneous, meditative and erotic, Alsop’s is an exciting new voice, expertly pitched ‘between the chaos and the bramble.’”
— Tony Tost

"These are poems possessed of both a remarkable intelligence and a delicate, even lace-like obliquity they might almost be called disjunctive meditations that enact a mysterious and elliptical conversation between language and what remains unsaid. As delicate an artistry as Alsop enacts, there is something sinewy and unsentimental about her perceptions. If this volume had a small window you could peer through, its heart within would be filled with stars, a little scary and terribly beautiful."
— Nancy Eimers