Cheryl Pallant

Cheryl Pallant

Engaging a rhythmic propulsion similar to that of the poet’s first book, Into Stillness offers a compelling meditation on the sacredness of the body in the shadow of atrocity. Her kinetic poetry swirls historical fragments with dream, memory, flesh, violence, human and ecstasy. With the flow of prose and the luminous interruptivity of poetry, Into Stillness explores the tension between self and other, existence and death, the word and its silence. The prose-like poems erupt from an innate yet unexplainable knowledge, surprising linguistically with their twists of meaning, landing in unexpected shapes and senses.

“Into Stillness is a death-defying act of language and imagination. An audacious, fluid living thing.” – Carole Maso

“Cheryl Pallant’s poems are remarkably attuned to the ever-changing relationship between language and the human body. She doesn’t describe experience so much as activate it, make it move as we move, close to others or away, close to ourselves or anguished by the gap between our desires and what we’ll let ourselves know of them. The poems of Into Stillness are explorations, not explanations, they are poems of process, of switching, of defeat and the return from defeat, of dissolution and the determination, always, to stand where it’s necessary to stand.” – Mark Wallace

Cheryl Pallant

This series of experimental poems—written in continuous prose-like paragraphs but with the rhythmic attentiveness of the finest verse – allows the ever-shifting present to emerge like various threads of a fabric in the making. Economic, political, and poetic subjects weave through the text, delivering meanings on one page that are unraveled on the next. Familiar word patterns transmute suddenly with an associative leap or syntactic twist or a play on sound, enacting the sense of the body in motion, the self seeking the other, or catching glimpses of the divine.

“Uncommon Grammar Cloth stretches the imaginings & musings of the unsuspecting reader. Refreshing in its unpredictability, its fascinating “moves,” Cheryl Pallant’s book is a strong debut on the post-post-modern stage.” – Anne Waldman

“Cheryl Pallant’s first book is written in continuous, prose-like “paragraphs” but with the rhythmic attentiveness of the finest verse. “Reality is unfinished business,” wrote poet Charles Olson, and these poems seem to say it is the Poet’s business to make sure – in spite of all temptations to bring meaning to closure – that it stays that way!” – Charles Stein

“Weaving words with rare energy and skill, Cheryl Pallant’s Uncommon Grammar Cloth joins the increasing number of contemporary cross-genre works that return writing to “writing” in ways both old and new, reviving the tradition harking back to Sterne and Stein, refusing to be boxed in as either “poetry” or “prose”: “extreme of stratospheric glee,” “thanks and welcome and arrivederci and Pontiac and rutabaga” – yes, right, and Onward! – Anselm Hollo