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Hilary Sideris's poems flash forward at lightning speed. Before you can blink, there's a back story, details become volatile, and we're catapulted into unfathomable history. The Q train goes express, a plague strikes. The America of "foaming root beer/in thick glass mugs" confronts active shooter drills. A "BLT's pale tomato" implies a vast system of servitude. Always, language is a bridge and a wall. Always, events elude the stories we shelter in. Jaime Sabines wrote, "everything happens in silence/the way light is made in the eye;" Sideris can access that inscrutability of experience, how we know ourselves only through clues and only in retrospect. LIBERTY LAUNDRY is a book of gorgeous immediacy and depth.
Dennis Nurkse, author of A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems Autism is a survival trait among prey animals. It's a rational instinct for separating a detail from the whole of something because a detail can kill you, while the whole of everything will let you live--most of the time. Sideris too focuses on those magic details. And in each of these short, lusty poems, she weaves the detail back into a fuller picture, now sharing its space with revelation to prepare us for the quickly approaching hour when we humans will become the prey animals, the shy but curious feast of our own predation. Barrett Warner, editor, Free State Review and Galileo Press |
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The Silent B -- twenty-nine short poems, each based upon a single word: dumb fire, sack, mint, dole, bank, seam. Each a punch to the solar plexus. Each another breath knocked out of you. Will she remind you not Emily Dickinson? Probably. Of Kay Ryan? More than likely. Surely they are soul sisters for whom life is language and language life. But this is Hilary Sideris for whom no word is allowed to keep silent. For whom the word Praise must be shouted from the rooftops. J. R. Solonche
Suspended between languages, the spare poems of Hilary Sideris's Un Amore Veloce suggest that a chain of personal discoveries secures our essential comfort, particularly in marriage and family life. They assure us of the possibility of renewal through observation and salvation through sharing -- the premise of all art and the twin engines of love at any speed. In this collection, Sideris commits to sharing her observations with honesty, courage, and humor in poems that spare us nothing. Rick Mullin |
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The Inclination to Make Waves is full of linguistic tricks, lively metaphysics, and shades of amorous play that range from joyous, to coy, to melancholy. In these poems - all of them tight couplets of five or six stanzas - she's alert to the nuances of sound and sense, tweaking idioms, teasing out strands of etymology, making the full range of language operative in the moment of the poem. Inspired by each poem's title-word, she seizes on its linguistic possibilities, to build from word to world. Neil Shepard |
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You needn't give a toss about Keith Richards or his autobiography to love Hilary Sideris's 'Most Likely To Die'. Each poem is a stand-alone vignette, with the lasting resonance of a haiku. But the cumulative power of this volume is visceral. These poems, one after another, each as rich as a blues 78, have attitude while still being tender. Covering the full arc of Richards's life, from wartime Britain to Altamont and other crossroads, these poems exemplify how a precise image or anecdote can make an Everyman out of an icon. Steve Koenig Pleasure and surprise await the reader of Hilary Sideris' gorgeous new cornucopia of herb poems, Sweet Flag. Here is bounty to fill our hearts, eyes, noses: 27 spare, fragrant mysteries so rich we inhale, savor, salivate and sigh. The poet invokes her Greek heritage as well as the pain of exile, denied yet persistent like the roots, leaves and fruit which infuse this collection: "Dark & sweet / Calliope Sideris / read Homer my father's / fortune in a cup... muddy & upturned as / the world..." Homer's daughter transforms that ache into art. "Sweet rush" indeed. Patricia Brody |
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The vehicle that these poems ride in on, I'll let readers discover on their own. What I will reveal, here, is that these are sharp - if not often biting - and funny - if not often hilarious - lyrics which explore the vulnerable self, the armed self, the self alone, the self in relationship through the power of metaphor; that which may be seen point black in our lives, masked here to gain objectivity, distance, clarity, and insight. These short, punchy lyrics are spare and unadorned, yet brilliantly textured, smart and multi dimensional. Martha Rhodes |
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Hilary Sideris is a "paramour of grammar" in her debut, The Orange Juice is Over", leaving an uncommunicative marriage and finding her pleasure in the miscommunication of Italian and English. These poems catch their sleeves on sviluppo and church, roll back slaughter to laughter, rest heads on pilafs, and stand up to pillar and pillager. She gnaws her spacious cage and buys a tight space, cleans house with household tricks, reglazes more than the tub. I love the trip and slide of meaning, the correspondence of food and tongue in words and mouth. The titles that start and finish this collection aptly spell Good Mate, which Sideris has found in verse and bed. Amy Holman |