" 'No word can clear itself' in this accomplished volume of poems, which illuminates how the contradictions and dualities concealed in language both betray and redeem us . . . McHugh emerges as a kind of seer, and her striking conceits and crackling rhythms reveal an intellect that is often as sensuous as it is clever."--
The New Yorker "Heather McHugh is one of the brightest of the Pacific Northwest's literary jewels . . . These poems slide like quicksilver in and out of one's grasp playful and provocative . . . McHugh's elusive, allusive language is the fitting instrument for knowing a world that is equally unsettled . . . McHugh's poems offer the constant delight of words and worlds made new. The Father of the Predicaments stands as a remarkable achievment of contemporary poetry."--
Seattle Times "Her writing is so alert to itself, so alert to language, it's like watching a dancer on a mirrored floor, stepping on her steps. She's practically playing with her words as she writes them down. 'Joycean' is the word that comes to mind . . . This kind of writing could seem like pure playfulness, but in McHugh it rarely does . . . She's a poet for whom wit is a form of spiritual survival."--Robert Hass,
The Washington Post Book World "McHugh's terse and deeply intelligent poems teach the virtues of wit, curiosity, patience and attention. Like Rilke and Celan, McHugh makes a poem into a storehouse of predicaments--a field of compound and divided meanings never synthesized or resolved . . . McHugh uses paradox and equivocation to quarry and refine hard truths from the vernacular: that living is dying, that the mind has only itself to know itself. McHugh's poems are not flights from these truths but honest and often humorous efforts to bear them."--
Newsday
HEATHER MCHUGH is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English at the University of Washingotn in Seattle. She also regularly reaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson college, near Ashville, N.C. She is the author of five books of poetry: Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993(Wesleyan, 1994), Shades (Wesleyan, 1988), To the Quick (Wesleyan, 1987) A World of Difference (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), and Dangers (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). She has translated three volumes of poetry: Because the Sea Is Black: Poems by Blaga Dimitrova (with co-translator Nikolai Popov, Wesleyan, 1989), D'Apres Tout: Poems by Jean Fallain (Princeton, 1982), and Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (with co-translator Nikolai Popov, Wesleyan, 2000). In 1993, Wesleyan published her literary essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality. Her version of Euripides' Cyclops (with an introduction by David Konstan) is forthcoming in a new series from Oxford University Press. Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993 was named a finalist for the national Book Award in 1994. Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan won the Griffin Prize in 2001. In 1999 she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.