Hooking

Mary Dalton's fifth collection, Hooking, is a series of centos that, on one level, draw inspiration from a traditional Newfoundland craft. Like a hooked rug made up of strips of fabric cut from old clothes, the cento is stitched together from lines scissored out of other poems. Dalton's cento variants, however, range across continents and epochs, rummaging among poems contemporary and canonical in celebration of the recombinatory energies of language. As Dalton's lines hook...
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Mary Dalton's fifth collection, Hooking, is a series of centos that, on one level, draw inspiration from a traditional Newfoundland craft. Like a hooked rug made up of strips of fabric cut from old clothes, the cento is stitched together from lines scissored out of other poems. Dalton's cento variants, however, range across continents and epochs, rummaging among poems contemporary and canonical in celebration of the recombinatory energies of language. As Dalton's lines hook together syntactically and emotionally, they create a striking music, by turns subtle, startling and dazzling.