Winter at a Summer House

The poems in Mary Beth Hines's first collection, Winter at a Summer House, strike a wonderful balance between narratives of everyday experience and a pristine, pure poetic imagination. Always rhythmically diverse, most of the time mellifluous, and often intense, Hines's poetry vividly paints the life of a modern self-made woman, with her worries and obligations, her family, and her dreams. In response to the heroine's world, this poetry, never static, vibrates with all sorts of emotions: love, friendship, youthful infatuations, amorousness, jealousy, altruism. As a result, the book gives its reader all the pleasures of a novel-and of lyric novelty.


Katia Kapovich, author of Gogol in Rome and Cossacks and Bandits


Mary Beth Hines sings to us out of the staircases, back yards, and swimming pools of a life sumptuously lived, a world rife with joys and enticements, with girlhood wish and adulthood tryst. Each song lifts on the updrafts of a language passionately breathed. The poems are arrayed with such stunning craft that the art dissolves into the narrative. One forgets that one is reading and imagines that one is reliving this life. Winter at a Summer House is, in the words of one of the poems, a "gift to spark remembrance," as if the memories had become our own.


Tom Daley, author of House You Cannot Reach


From birth/death and first/last words-- the poems in Mary Beth Hines's collection, Winter at a Summer House, entice us into the arc of a woman's life, and tip us into her fall from innocence into experience. The poems are dares, flirting with risk, and holding bliss and danger in a tactile bond of "teeth and ice, breath and coyotes." They give us what we want from poetry: to be bundled up and awakened; to be reminded before the storm that the storm is coming. We must hold hands and walk under the shape-shifting sky of "old faces--familiar, before they split/and spill, erase us."


Kelly DuMar, author of girl in tree bark, Tree of the Apple, and All These Cures