Open Interval

'Teach the sonnet's a cell'—says the speaker in one of Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon's compelling new poems, as she prepares to teach poetry to inmates at a New York State prison, 'now try to escape-'. This poet's astute and various formal choices perform exactly that work, containing the poem then constructing an opportunity for the splendidly intelligent maker of these artful forms to step into the light. ]Open Interval[ not only confirms the promise of Van Clief-Stefanon's first book but takes her work to startling new heights.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon asserts early in ]Open Interval[ that 'Poise begins here: / in cinders, in rhyme, in splintering beauty into this / and this—:' and the volume's inventive splintering becomes luminous exploration of the body—human and celestial. Part of its concern 'the crushing need / for form' in intricate re-navigations of the personal and historical, the mythic and scientific, the book's shape is finally more lyric constellation than traditional collection, the poems themselves variable stars, beautifully intense, pulsing.

A lovely medition on the concept of distance . . . Van Clief-Stefanon's work is colorful, sometimes playful, grounded in reality, yet other-wordly at the same time.

At once luminous and fiercely heartrending.

Exceptional . . . represents a quantum leap in imagination, as she has discovered that the more distance one attains from the hardened self, the clearer it becomes to the observer. Her attention has swung from the relaxed narrative line to formal perfection.

Van Clief-Stefanon continues to draw from science, history, the Bible, and autobiography to make elliptical, lovely poems.