A Living Conversation: Entwine by Mary Newell Reviewed at NewPages
We’re delighted to share a thoughtful new review of Mary Newell’s Entwine, published this week at NewPages and written by poet and critic Jami Macarty. The review beautifully captures the meditative depth and ecological intimacy that make Newell’s collection so extraordinary.
Macarty describes Entwine as a “reverent exploration” of connection—an invitation to notice how human and more-than-human lives are bound together. From her Hudson Highlands home, Newell listens closely to the living world, and her poems respond in kind: humble, curious, and filled with a pulse of shared vitality.
“Totem oak, may I call you kin, care for your wounds?”
— Entwine
In her review, Macarty highlights Newell’s inventive use of form and language. Entwine moves across prose poems, acrostics, and scattered-field compositions—each shape reflecting a living system in motion. Hyphens, gaps, and pauses become part of an ecological syntax, echoing the rhythms and silences of growth, dispersal, and renewal. The result, Macarty writes, is a “heart-proximal almanac,” where words and world coexist in luminous attention.
Macarty also notes that Newell’s work resists romanticism. Entwine acknowledges loss and fragility—climate shifts, species decline, the ache of separation—without losing sight of wonder. The poems offer not answers but a stance: one of care, reciprocity, and reverence for life’s interwoven continuities.
Entwine, as this review makes clear, is not simply a collection of poems but a conversation—an act of attunement that asks us to listen more deeply to the world we inhabit.
Read the full review here:
👉 “Entwine by Mary Newell” at NewPages
And explore Entwine from BlazeVOX [books] here:
📖 Entwine by Mary Newell
