Alissa Fleck has written a nice review of The Alphabet Conspiracy at New Pages. Here’s an excerpt:
[Reese’s] work explores language as simultaneously a source of despair and salvation. Without language perhaps human suffering could be lessened, perhaps we could be freer, but language is also a safe, neutral ground we can return to when the world is too much. Reese’s gift lies in her ability to swing the camera from the general and hyperbolic to the small yet satisfying details, leaving us with the lasting glow of beautiful imagery. The poet is able to make the reader enter her world, even sustaining interest throughout the poetic deconstruction of a single word, as in “Hunger.” There is a real sadness to this book as well as it interweaves snippets of familial turmoil and tenderness and toys with death, but it never throws the reader fully overboard without a way back.
–Alissa Fleck
Read the full review here.