Age of Glass

“'The engine of alchemy / was rage. The small man's history of winning / was long but irrelevant,' remarks Anna Maria Hong midway through Age of Glass. This caustic suite of ludic sonnets upcycles old stories—myths, fairytales, fables, clichés—into bright, prismatic spells for the end of days. 'Slant reuses / the cant of the box,' the canny speaker incants. 'A palindrome pulse / recalibrates luck.' Open this book to any page and you'll be met with lines so timely, so tonic, and so lexically dexterous you'll feel enchanted, however fleetingly, to cohabit this age."—Suzanne Buffam

“Like the 17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose sonnets echo and upstage a notably male and European literary tradition, Anna Maria Hong demonstrates in her own labyrinthine sonnets 'the monstrous breadth' of her poetic abilities, offering in them radical interpretations of myths and fairy tales that speak to our time and dazzle us with their wit and linguistic virtuosity. No one is writing like Anna Maria Hong in this Age of Glass.”—Rosa Alcalá

“Anna Maria Hong's poems—in this case a book of astoundingly innovative sonnets—confirm to us the credo we store in our hearts: that with intelligence, musicality and a love of language poetry can make any subject compelling and revelatory. But it takes a poet with a rare talent like Anna Maria Hong to make us see and joyously declaim what we believe. Age of Glass is a book I've been hoping to read for a long time, from a poet whose work I’ve admired for a longer time."—Khaled Mattawa