A Model Year

Author: Gina Myers

Publisher: Coconut Books (2009)

"Reading Gina Myers is like the pleasure of listening to the most quiet notes in Morty Feldman's music. It's a green music where everything is convincing, simply refined and secretly fiery. The poetry seems to have taken a polygraph test and has the truthfulness of an injured voice. Photographs of loving are here and also the very global shifts between her Michigan and her New York. It's humble and observant as the figurative art of Schuyler, but there is always a funny pointillism that points to nothing except love without hope. A whole year in single sighs, the scale being life-size: a world of yes and no, a long poem in arpeggios, and full disclosure as a fear and poetics."

–David Shapiro

"Gina Myers's A Model Year contains more grace, precision, and wisdom than I've encountered in one place for some time. Myers writes with a melancholic confidence that is all her won, but which also pays homage to an exquisite assortment of ghosts, poetic and otherwise. 'We each have our own word for loneliness,' she writes, and her poems relentlessly chart the contours of emptiness, stasis, silence, and longing. Their sadness is everywhere laced, however, with inspiring, life-sustaining forms of honesty and generosity. 'I'd like to give all the quiet things to you,' Myers writes—and here, in pitch-perfect language, in poem after poem, she does."

–Maggie Nelson