Crossing Pleasure Avenue

We take our pleasure as we can, Karen Hildebrand writes in the title poem to Crossing Pleasure Avenue, in a voice filled with desire tempered by loss. And there is much pleasure in this book of terse lyrics that engages the reader with humor, brio, and bite, in poems about everything from the 60s TV show Leave It to Beaver with a crossdressing Beev, to imagining a year without men, to envisioning widows hijacking the C train. In these wildly imaginative poems, Karen Hildebrand sings the aging woman’s body electric!

SHARON DOLIN

Karen Hildebrand’s poetry is like sociology–if sociology could be felt by the hairs on one’s neck and seen in fragrant, Fauvist Technicolor. Her brilliant debut full-length collection, Crossing Pleasure Avenue, reminds us of the strangeness of the everyday and the pleasure in those ripe moments when the past and the present buckle and overlap.

JOANNA FUHRMAN

Only Karen Hildebrand could write an ode to toilets of the world called Dear John ; A History of Feminism that includes a bucket list; The Sixties, Explained via beloved TV shows; Ode to My Bunion ; and The Day the Widows Hijack the C Train. From moonshine ranch wives to Emily Dickinson and her fruitcake to a Femme Fatale, Hildebrand honors the women who have come before and the women who we are. She is funny, fervent, and fierce. Crossing Pleasure Avenue is delightfully profound. I’d take a walk with her poetry any day!

DENISE DUHAMEL