Hover
Winner of the 2013 Patricia Bibby Award
"'If she could rest/ she'd tilt her chair to watch/ holes in the overturned bowl of her skull,' Erin Malone writes. All around and through the orderly, finely-crafted poems in Erin Malone's most impressive first book, Hover, reality exists--as in blurred, as in upset, as in sorrow, as in prayer. Reality, after all, is all about courage."
— Ralph Angel, Contest Judge
"The poems in Hover deftly explore the worlds of loss and personal dislocation. Malone's principal technique is compression, and the music that results from her carefully-considered, chiseled lines is crystalline. Hover is a rewarding, emotionally resonant debut collection."
— Linda Bierds, author of Flight: New and Selected Poems
"I simply love Erin Malone's Hover—its perfection of phrase, its sheer lucidity, its open heart. There are real hauntings and anxieties here, often of the most excruciating, heart-wrenching variety, but somehow the book leaves me in the mood of a crisp, clear morning on which one feels amazed to be alive. 'It's taken me this long to become human,' Malone writes; taken together, the poems in Hover convey that earned, admirable sense of humanness, in language that shines."
— Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Argonauts