Reviews

“Christina Pugh’s new book of poetry, The Right Hand: Poems, might be labelled as well a collection of Zen koans, so compressed and taut the language and syntax of every line and stanza. Organized into two parts, ‘Into the Skin’ and ‘L’Incontro: The Meeting,’ and full of disparate themes such as piercing and weaving, the yin and yang of opposites nevertheless meld together to cohere into one body (in every sense of the word).”

—Richard Holinger, Poetry International

“The Right Hand, the latest poetry collection by Christina Pugh, possesses abstraction dancing with tradition, faith with the mystical, form that examines line and white space with the material body. Bravery exists within these pages sensing an indefinable quality amid an intense clarity in discussing pain within the body. The collection possesses deep truths with an oracle-like energy commingled with mystical meditations. The cover of the book echoes these truths and sentiments as the Bernini sculpture Ecstasy of St. Teresa leads the reader inward. The ecstasy and the Christian mysticism St. Teresa of Avila wrote about in multiple autobiographies is present (even omnipresent) within the two poems that make up this collection.

“This collection is a full awareness of meditation and yearning. The Right Hand adds the hand of a Bernini depicting a saint in the throes of a mystical awakening. Pugh’s enrapture is clear in these poems and in reading this collection the reader is invited into that joy and the delights within that joy even if getting there may involve some musing on bodily pain and yearning.”

—Carrie McGath, Third Coast Review

“Apocalyptic writing has always wrestled with the same question that drives poetry: what can language reveal when the world seems on the verge of collapse? In her Tupelo Press collection from 2024, The Right Hand, Christina Pugh transforms that ancient tension into an inquiry, both of spirit and of body. 

“Her poems inherit the intensity of ‘The Book of Revelation’ yet move through the material world: needles, basil leaves, marble, skin, with an alert and visionary calm. Apocalypse, in her poetry, becomes an opening, rather than an ending.

“Reading Pugh, I kept returning to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s idea that ‘to read poetry is essentially to daydream.’ The daydream, he says, joins reality and imagination into one deep current. In The Right Hand, that current runs through each poem, seemingly breathing the ache of revelation into ordinary matter. ‘Consent is a power. To yield is a power. I might even say: to yearn is a power,’ Pugh writes, her syntax moving like prayer, widening the space between submission and strength until they become indistinguishable.

“Pugh’s poems cut through the crust of intellect to reach sensation. They enact a reversal of Cartesian logic: not ‘I think, therefore I am,’ but ‘I feel, therefore I believe.”’

“‘The skin, not the mind, creates the soul,’ she writes, a line that could stand as the collection’s credo. Pugh shows that devotion and resistance share the same nerve. Her ‘yielding’ is an act of radical openness: the refusal to harden even when the world burns.

“Apocalypse, for Pugh, is revelation in motion: the moment the old order collapses and something merciful flickers underneath. Her poems testify that endings are always beginnings disguised.

“With the line, ‘Pierced by rained gold,’ Pugh turns pain into illumination. In that transformation lies Pugh’s art’s quiet audacity. She reminds readers that the divine still enters through the smallest breaches: a pinprick, a leaf, a word.

“The reader leaves The Right Hand less with dread, and more with a strange steadiness. We recognize that collapse is our shared condition, but also that her sparse language: precision and grace, can make that knowledge bearable. Pugh inhabits exactly that halfway space, turning apocalypse into attention, and attention into a praise of Baroque art.”

—Nicholas Skaldetvind, New Mexico Daily Lobo

“In poetry that dazzles with its erudition and cosmopolitan approach, Christina Pugh shows us the role of language in constructing—and eventually deconstructing—the self. ‘In a room made of windows, glass is the skin,’ she tells us. At turns luminous and devastating, the work in this gorgeous volume reveals every facet of the narrator’s lived experience—from inhabiting the physical body to articulating a sophisticated artistic sensibility—as discursive constructs, arising out of a nexus of community and shared experience. ‘[L]ike a flock we all landed at Teresa and the angel,’ she recounts. Yet, at the same time, Pugh interrogates the narrator’s lingering sense of cultural and linguistic otherness, revealing connection with those around her as both contingent and inherently unstable. The voice that emerges from this intersection of philosophy and art, celebration and elegy, is as singular as it is eloquent. ‘I’m thinking everyone must have a fulcrum,’ she writes, ‘The place from which we radiate.’ These are poems that radiate with incredible artistic vision and writerly craft.”

—Editors’ citation, Tupelo Press

“I had thought the mystery of the body and the mystery of faith were different mysteries, and then I read Christina Pugh’s The Right Hand, and learned I’d been thinking wrong. I want to say that this book is two books stitched together by an intelligence of remarkable sensitivity, but it isn’t true.  Rather, the two long poems of which the whole is comprised—‘Into the Skin’ and ‘L’Incontro: The Meeting’—act as stereoscope, bringing the body’s pain and the soul’s ecstasy into their overlapping dimensionality which makes them, finally, real. Skin pierced is the primary principle: the poet’s experience with acupuncture to remedy chronic pain, St. Teresa of Avila (as depicted by Bernini and her own words), pierced by the spear of the angel. In lines needle-sharp, Pugh works toward the radical passivity that might be poetry’s highest achievement—that to the pain one is in, some hand unbidden comes, and relieves it. Call that inspiration or call it intervention, call it Muse or call it medicine, the result is the same: the shattered nerve stitches together again into the possibility of beauty, and these are beautiful poems, true to both body and soul.”

—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk

“In a shimmering phenomenology of body, spirit, and soul, The Right Hand resides at the tender junction of nerve and bone, ‘a nexus: metropolitan.’ In her radiant collection, Christina Pugh’s astute eye illuminates Maya Lin’s lovely river of pins, St. Teresa of Avila with an angel, and wonders such as a ‘sea of porphyry.’ A mystical cartography of the senses, Pugh’s earthbound threshold of the human resonates with our longing for God and the eternal, mapping a basil leaf juxtaposed to a basilica, displaying ‘the flash of a neural jewel,’ or glowing with ‘this notion / of chance in carved marble / unfettering the seam / between watcher / and creator.’”

—Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Beautiful Immunity

“The Right Hand is a circle of a book—but better to use the word ‘loop’ than ‘circle.’ But better still to say The Right Hand is a book of concentric circles, and by saying so loop back around to ‘circle.’ It is a book that grows by listening to itself, and as one reads its final pages one recognizes not only the world it has grown to become, but also the bigness of the world already there in its first pages—by the end, the living flesh that was omnipresent in the book’s first part has become the stony flesh of Saint Teresa as represented by Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and, startlingly, the flesh is even more alive. The Right Hand is, in other words, a living book, and makes more life, and enlarges the life of its reader.”

—Shane McCrae, author of The Many Hundreds of the Scent