"Blythe brings a mastery of precision and cadence to bear in creating poems that pulse with emotion, complexity and vulnerability
— CBC Spring Preview [...]
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"With incredible economy of language and dialectical drama at the levels of sentence and caesura, Blythe delivers taut yet expansive hymns from 'the golden-throated era / of the hormone'
— Quill & Quire starred review [...]
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"Hymnswitch is at its most powerful in its longest poems, where Blythe’s sense of orchestration is on fullest display….It’s exciting to see a writer so conscious of building a body of work within and across collections, pursuing not just a set of ideas and concerns but an artistic vision
— The Puritan [...]
"You...have been invited into an intimate space, to wear the poet’s skin for a moment, to hold his breath
— CV2 [...]
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"I just completely devoured...Hymnswitch
— Writer's Trust Recommended Read by Adam Sol
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“Ali Blythe pierces your skins, awakening perceptions you had allowed to settle under the surface.
— matthew heinz, author of Entering Transmasculinity
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“Ali Blythe's Hymnswitch wears the good, solid boots of language to trek through the unsendable here of daily decision. Here the little bent nails of punctuation assemble to testify to the bruised thumbs and split silence of hammerblows and timbercrack. The hands of the clock, like those little nails, tick past in a recitation of clarity.
— Derek Beaulieu, Calgary Poet Laureate, 2014-2016
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“An intimate, attentive, and patiently affecting book that lives up to all of the possibilities of its title. Meditating on time, god(s), gender, sobriety, and love, the intelligence at work here is intellectual and emotional – courage in the service of discovery, which at its core is a surrender to vulnerability
— TC Tolbert, Tucson Poet Laureate
