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Rhea Tregebov : Comments by Writers and Critics


About Mapping the Chaos


"Perhaps there is a beauty in the logic of mapping; or perhaps the beauty lies in the chaos. The most interesting art performs a simultaneous imposition of order and a resistance to it. This is what Tregebov's book Mapping the Chaos achieves."
                     —Catherine Hunter, Prairie Fire


"Mapping the Chaos is daring and original CC genuinely radical. [...] It is, in fact, a breakthrough: an evolutionary leap in style that exceeds the expectations her work has created until now."
                     —Carmine Starnino, The Montreal Gazette.


About The Proving Grounds


"The Proving Grounds will only add to Tregebov's growing reputation."
                     —Douglas Barbour, The Toronto Star.


"...almost always, in this very human and intelligent chronicle of remedial joys and difficult sorrows, [Tregebov] does make us feel life's pain and the substantial release to be earned in surviving and naming it. ...[The Proving Grounds] is a book that can be recommended not only to the only people poets suspect ever read their work (other poets) but also to all those greater multitudes who customarily don't, and among these, in particular, to parents, nurses, doctors, and gardeners."
                     —Elisabeth Harvor, The Antigonish Review.


About her poetry as a whole


"Tregebov's poetry is brilliant in that it makes ordinary things shine brightly, thereby revealing the connections between them."
                     —Canadian Book Review Annual


"Since Tregebov will take risks that other poets avoid, her desire to connect the personal and distant sometimes falls short of fulfilment, yet these intense, deliberate, often gawky poems offer rewards that you will not find in prettier, more contented poetry."
                     —Kingston Whig Standard


"Rhea Tregebov's poetry cuts to the quick, exposing us, through cracks in the ordinary and familiar, to the raw wounded flesh."
                     —Prairie Fire


"In poems of deceptive brevity, 'this hard and rocky place' that is the world turns out to be the source of a lucid beauty. I am tempted to say that this exemplary collection is the essential Rhea Tregebov. It has the intellectual honesty, the curiosity, the willingness, the risk."
                     — Roo Borson


"For decades Rhea Tregebov has been writing poems of penetrating honesty. At their core is a deep familiarity with the necessities of love; inconsolable loss, inconsolable hope. What strength and what tenderness there is in her embrace of these necessities. The clarity of her voice is deeply moving, a voice at home in its skin, entirely aware, deeply compassionate."
                     — Anne Michaels



Rhea Tregebov's works copyright © to the author.


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