Vortex Street

Poetry. Confirming the truth that grief is the growing-pot of beauty, VORTEX STREET mourns the passage of time in the forms of loss of youth and youthful dreams, dying parents, omnipresent knowledge of the world’s violence, the past enshrined in a house for sale. Page Hill Starzinger, acute and excitingly associative, articulates these complex sorrows with unflinching originality. These poems remind the reader what it feels like to live in the moment as moments inexorably move on; they will stay with you.–Kathleen Ossip

Last swelling of the uterus, last circuit of a childhood home, last flare of recognition on a father’s face: ‘It is most certainly the end of something, ’ writes the poet in these pages. And upon that unblinking apprehension builds an edifice of praise. We love the world because we are doomed to lose it, and nowhere is that love more eloquently manifest than in poems like those of VORTEX STREET.–Linda Gregerson

Page Starzinger’s work is both bold and reticent, harsh and tender, worldly and confined. Conflicting impulses make her poems feel necessary–and though these are the attributes of a solitary observer, she also embraces our communal griefs.It all occurs in a swirl, an intermixing of memory, biology, history, and circumstance that both smudges and illuminates experience.–Ron Slate, On The Seawall

In Page Hill Starzinger'sVORTEX STREET, the poet explores many different kinds of loss, to resist squandering what is given. In her revisions of complicated grief, she takes up the subjects of unborn children, the ending of fertility, and becoming an orphaned adult after the death of parents.–Shin Yu Pai, New Pages Blog