“Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns.” — Elizabeth Hardwick, 1959
One of my online routines is reading The Book Jotter each week. It’s a reliable way to keep up with what’s going on in the literary world, and if you care about books at all, I recommend subscribing.
One item it brought me this week was an entertaining essay Are Book Reviews Gaslighting Us? on the demise and bankruptcy of the book review — and this set me off thinking about blurbs and their excesses, particularly the lavish praise recently heaped on the shed-dwelling Westchester poet C. Langley Dunwood.
Some of that praise appeared in The Seasloth Review, and as co-founder of that entirely fictional yet indispensable literary journal, I should probably acknowledge the conflict of interest upfront.
The essay argues that professional book reviewing in the United States is collapsing — and what remains is largely toothless. As newspapers cut staff critics and outsource reviews to freelancers (often fellow authors), the results skew overwhelmingly positive. Industry incentives, social pressure, and a general fear of backlash all play their part. According to data from BookMarks, roughly 95% of reviews are favourable, while a vanishing 0.3% are outright negative — producing what the author aptly calls a culture of “gaslighting positivity.”
This isn’t a new complaint. Elizabeth Hardwick was already taking a scalpel to the phenomenon in 1959. And yet little has changed, except perhaps the intensity of the praise. No one enjoys mean-spirited or gratuitously harsh reviews, but endless hyperbolic commendation serves no one either. As the essay puts it: “We would never trust a product reviewer who gave a thumbs-up to 332 out of every 333 products.” Or more pointedly: “The book reviewer who waters down their criticism does a favor to the author but a disservice to the rest of us.”
If the situation in fiction seems bleak, I suggest a brief excursion into the sealed echo chamber of contemporary poetry where breathless prose informs the waiting tens of eager readers which slim volumes are “urgent,” “unforgettable,” and “of our moment.”
Paraic O’Donnell once made a bingo card of such book review cliches; swap out a few squares and you have much the same game for poetry although maybe even windier.
The Seasloth Review recently invited its readers to write fair and balanced reviews of some of the authors it has generously supported and promoted.
Among the submissions were the following three responses, reproduced here with minor editorial interventions (mostly involving the removal of unnecessary references to compost, wisteria, and weather systems as metaphors for awareness).
These three poems center on C. Langley Dunwood, whose work is frequently featured in the Review. An interview with editor Philippa Crane will appear in an upcoming edition, in which Dunwood comments on the growth of Dunwoodism within writers’ workshops, her recent political awakening, and answers question about the shed.
I. The Recurring Light
Cosy New & Selected Verse: A Manifesto in Blurbs
I like a poetry that is liminal and unstoppable —
or so the jacket tells me,
with love
and furious tenderness folded neatly inside:
an invitation to savour the inessential,
to measure the real,
to mine the grief-hoard we all politely carry.
I like it when self-observation rises to “true poetry”
through startling verbal delights and a knack for — oops —
just when you think you know where it’s going,
you step off a cliff, which turns out on closer inspection
to be a municipal kerb,
and suddenly find yourself
ankle-deep in the Mod Podge of art.
I like the maturing thrill
of work made more astounding by each new adulation,
smart and earnest in its commerce with metaphor,
celebrating grief in motion, solitude amid the crowd,
challenging the confinement of the morning bus,
or perhaps just the daily commute to the screen.
I like how it feigns austerity, arranging its freedoms —
no metered formality here, just the quick study,
the sly slant, the studied looseness,
the windy liberty of a garden shed.
And all the stuff of a life — marginalised, mature, overlooked —
rendered luminous through sheer incantation:
a crochet person, teacher, potter, bloggist,
fishing and sketching living luminous poems
that put you right there in the back garden,
feeling the exhilaration of the lived experience.
I’ve been working on my third modest collection.
It’s nearly there. The blurbs are ready.
They say it’s thrilling, tender, relentless, necessary.
They say it with such love.
Pass the biscuits — it’s cosy in here.
II. A Modest Manifesto for the Contemporary Serious Poet
We affirm, with calibrated solemnity
and brows arranged in ethical concern,
that the line break is no longer
a whim, but a site of active refusal
against capitalism, late-stage whatever,
and several other things we haven’t researched.
Each enjambment is a tiny guillotine.
To interrupt syntax
is to interrupt empire.
Rhyme is decorative surveillance,
a colonial grid imposed upon
the wild contingencies
of liberated utterance.
We reject punctuation.
The full stop is authoritarian closure;
the comma privileges sequence;
the exclamation mark
has been retired pending review.
Ampersands remain permissible
as gestures toward collective becoming.
We maintain that obscurity
is a reparative practice.
Should a reader comprehend a poem
upon first encounter,
the text has failed
to honour the necessary opacity
of serious witness.
All positions must be queered,
including those of page layout,
authorial intention,
and basic legibility.
Humor is a concession
to extractive attention economies.
Joy, unless rigorously contextualised,
risks reinstating dominant narratives
of coherence.
We wear black
so that our vulnerability
photographs with proper contrast.
At panel events
we sit angled slightly away
from one another,
to signify productive discomfort.
Finally, in a sober serif font
of sufficient austerity,
surrounded by restorative white space,
we declare poetry
the final remaining location
for moral seriousness
in an age otherwise given over
to distraction, commerce,
and people enjoying things incorrectly.
Therefore the poet must remain vigilant.
At no point, under any circumstances,
must one appear
to have had
a pleasant afternoon.
III. The Poet at Work
C. Langley sat in her garden shed.
“My writer’s retreat,” she called it instead.
She recited a poem, one of her own —
no paper needed; she knew it by bone.
“Is it liminal?” she wondered aloud.
“Essential? Luminous? Tender? Proud?
Is this deep, or perhaps insufferable fluff?”
The silence suggested: Not quite enough.
Smitten with doubts that unbidden arose,
she clutched a biscuit, adopted a pose.
Head tilted just so, as if listening for
the echo of praise from some distant shore.
“Does it witness?” she asked the geranium pot.
“Does it land before thought, or is that just rot?
A poet of margins, whose margins were booked —
marginal victim, not quite overlooked.”
The biscuit was stale, the tea had gone cold.
The poem — she knew — was just over-sold,
like small quiet things that slip out of sight,
half-open, half-shut, like the shed’s fading light.
Not furious, not tender, not proud in the least,
just one wistful poet alone at her feast.
(Somewhere, a blurb-writer turns in his sleep:
“Unstoppable verse — yes, that one we can keep.”)
Advance Praise for Shed Lines from the Publisher (Barbeque Books / Smoke and Sauce Press)
Dunwood’s Shed Lines arrives as the muscular culmination of a mid-career spent in deliberate retreat — both literal and metaphysical. Here is a poet whose origin stories have been patiently composted in the quiet rot of a garden shed, transforming the overlooked detritus of daily life into material for unlikely experiments and fly-fishing. Fierce yet oddly tender, refusing the comfort of the inessential, this new and selected work moves with a curious agency, charting the narrow space between the half-open window and the half-shut door, between the stale biscuit, the cold tea, and the crochet basket. Langley’s voice is unapologetic and exquisitely marginal — proof that “witness” may emerge not from the spotlight but from the shadowed corner where the geranium pot listens in.
Gurdeep Guzundah
“C. Langley Dunwood writes with a sharp tenderness that is both intimate and cosmic. These poems refuse austerity, reject preciousness, and explode formality in elegant slow motion. Beneath every line pulses a will to forego the ornamental and strike at the underground machinery of grief we all carry but rarely name. This is poetry that lands before thought — raw, luminous, delicious.”
Bobby Beam
“What startles most in Dunwood’s work is how the stuff of life rises, almost without effort, to the yeasty level of what we still call performance. On every page, there are moments when the ordinary — a biscuit crumb, a fading light through the shed window — suddenly flares into something grippingly essential. She has a rare gift for sudden apprehension that never feels forced: just the quiet slap of recognition. I finished Shed Lines feeling I that I too wanted a garden shed.
Piet Thaal
“Here is the exhilaration of motion arrested in stillness: the poet at her potting bench, foot on the accelerator of intention, hand on her potter’s wheel, a forward-facing journey through grief, doubt, and the sheer persistence of being. Langley’s agency is unapologetic; her margins are not boundaries but launch pads and landing docks. Smart, visceral, sonically vibrant, this collection resists confinement by time, space, or expectation. It is, quite simply, a small force of the identity world made visible.”
Herbert Wales
“Slyly rendered like the most crafted fly-fishing lures, Langley’s poems possess a windy freedom that belies their depth. There is a marked surface here — of invention, of form, of the self that dares to sit in a shed and ask the hard questions. Down the garden path of the page she goes: no false steps, always open to the rose trellis of the real. A poet of mature vision whose work ripens, and grows more centered with time.”
Joanie Offpiste
“C. Langley Dunwood’s Shed Lines is a masterclass in quiet revelation. The poems witness without posturing, name without shaming, land without clang. In the space between the geranium’s droop and the biscuit’s crumble, she uncovers a tenderness so raw and original it startles like a deer caught in headlights. This is poetry that earns its daily bread not through obscurity but through the clarity of unflinching fog — proof that the overlooked can become unforgettable.”
The Seasloth Review
“Dunwood’s third collection (and first gathered & selected) is nothing less than a seismic event in the quiet corner of contemporary verse. Marginal yet central, wistful yet assertive, her voice refuses easy categories. Readers will find themselves in the garden shed with her — head tilted just so, listening for the echo of their own unspoken questions. Unmissable. Unmatchable. Unparalleled.”
From the Author’s Own Back-Cover Note
I’ve been working on this one for years. It’s nearly there.
Pass the tea. The kettle’s just boiled.
