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The Green Tuxedo » Reviews and Comments
"Her poems are rich with irony and (like a man wearing a green tuxedo) they are dressed up, but not for high society: they demonstrate a bold style in a humorous and approachable voice."
—Jere Odell, Samizdat
"While sorting through her father's things after his death, acclaimed poet Janet Holmes uncovered two of the journals he kept during the 1920s. These journals became the source material for much of the poetry in Holmes's second collection, The Green Tuxedo. Excerpts from his diaries are interposed with Holmes's own efforts to create a portrait of her father as a young man. One poem is a 76-line list of names copied from the journal under the title 'Wild Women I Have Known,' and the next poem speculates its meaning: 'I search my father's scrapbook with its photographs and clippings: round faces with beestung lips. His type? and the decade got named for the sounds the wild make.' The result is deeply affecting and deeply cool."
—Anne Ursu, City Pages
"Holmes's allegiance, it turns out, is to the details—the singular mystery of cloven lemons ripening into fractured suns, that particular slant of postsolstice light on snowy ground. There's palpable loneliness shot through this terrain, much of it set in a sort of afterwards—after the love affair sours, after the house is emptied, the photographs yellowed, the injuries scarred over. The better, and more disturbing, poems shatter traditional narrative form by injecting panicked asides and disembodied cries for help that leave little chance for an unscathed escape. . . ."
—Josie Rawson, Rain Taxi
"Janet Holmes' first book, The Physicist at the Mall, introduced us to a remarkable new voice: fiercely intelligent, buoyant with humor, alert to mysteries of language and landscape. The Green Tuxedo more than fulfills the earlier book's promise, adding to it a formal inventiveness and mastery that amazes and delights. . . . If any recent book could capture a new and reluctant audience for poetry, this is it."
—Tom Andrews
"The Green Tuxedo is one of the most original books of poetry I've read in some time. Janet Holmes possesses an enviable virtuosity: whether in luminous lyric voice or in the seemingly straightforward prose 'found poem' segments, her subtle shifts of mind and canny juxtapositions delight the reader with digressions and returns, with perceptiveness and grace."
—Susan Ludvigson
"The Green Tuxedo is a wonderful book. . . . Godspeed this book's light into the darkness that surrounds us all."
—Tom Lux
"Janet Holmes explores and celebrates the most intimate moments of our separate histories—especially our struggle 'against the literal.' Her voice is the sound of lives briefly converging or colliding. . . ."
—Dionisio D. Martínez
Read poems from The Green Tuxedo:
"Against
the Literal"
"The
Blue World"
