Mary Newell's Entwine Celebrated on Restless Messengers
There are some books that arrive quietly and then continue unfolding long after the final page is turned. Mary Newell's Entwine is one of those books.
We are delighted to share that poet, scholar, and critic Anthony Lioi has written a substantial and deeply thoughtful review of Entwine on the respected poetry site Restless Messengers / Poetry in Review.
From the opening lines of his review, Lioi recognizes what makes Newell's work so distinctive. He describes Entwine as a "celebration of entanglement," a collection that explores the intricate relationships between species, landscapes, memory, history, and language. Rather than treating nature as scenery or symbol, Newell's poems inhabit a world where observation becomes a form of participation and wonder becomes a form of knowledge.
Lioi traces the book's rich lineage through traditions of natural history, ecopoetry, and environmental writing, connecting Newell's work to figures such as Rachel Carson while emphasizing her uniquely contemporary voice. He praises the collection's ability to balance scientific attentiveness with lyric beauty, noting how Newell's poems refuse easy separations between art and ecology, personal experience and planetary history.
The review also celebrates Newell's formal inventiveness. Whether shaping poems into visual movements across the page or creating dreamlike spaces where human, tree, moon, and memory intersect, Entwine demonstrates a remarkable flexibility of form. Lioi argues that these formal choices are never decorative; they are essential to the book's larger vision of interconnected life.
We are grateful for this generous and insightful engagement with Mary Newell's work. Reviews like this remind us of poetry's enduring ability to connect observation with imagination, and individual experience with the wider world.
We encourage readers to spend time with Lioi's full review and, of course, with Entwine itself—a collection that continues to reveal new connections each time it is opened.
Read the complete review here:
Anthony Lioi's review of Entwine on Poetry in Review / Restless Messengers
Buy a copy of Mary Newell's Entwine here.
