In her notes to The Redesignation of Paradise, Denise Newman tells us she sets out “to write these poems to examine our entangled relationship to habitat.” With sparkling intensity, she asks anew, what is paradise and what is our relationship to it? Where is the eros of living beings in the scent map of our awareness practice? In bliss, in woe, or in between, every living being reproduces, creates, decomposes. Whether they are “doing it,” in nature or imagining it from the Garden State, “this is happening.” Rising and falling, there’s always a first day (and night) to create exceptions to a rule. Readers, Newman’s luminous, lambent poetic examination hits the mark.
— Norma Cole
Denise Newman reveals a fecund, lusty world infused with the sheer energy of life, where “earth itself is having sex between particles of dust.” This paradise isn’t the protected space of the walled garden, but the churning, chance-driven wonder of everything everywhere. From the intricate mating dance of a damselfly, to a mother dying after a long illness, Newman’s inclusive paradise erects no barriers. In the finely-hewn tracery of her language, in her blend of exuberance, grief, and hope, Newman challenges us to recognize paradise as the thing we're already part of: life, and its urge to go on.
— Mary Burger, author of Then Go On and Sonny
In The Redesignation of Paradise, Denise Newman offers an account of “going into the gut/ where opposites meet,” reminding us that “ripening is simultaneously withering.” She renders being on this earth as “the history of falling together,” drawing on deep attention and/as collaboration with human and non-human persons. Newman invites us to consider the ethics of our relations in that expansive space we call “nature,” the role of poetry in the face of “the beating rain of capital” and the shadows cast by war and climate change. “[S]tudy everything as you/ and not you,” she advises, and her book conjures one of many guides for this practice in the woman who “listens six stories up/ to grass walking in the dark.” Listen to these poems listening for you and the echoes of that beyond that is beside you.
— Brent Armendinger, author of Street Gloss and The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying
