On Christina Pugh

I was taken with Christina's poems when I first heard them, and when I read them my sense of her extraordinary talent was confirmed. She seems to me quite simply one of the most promising younger poets I have run across in years, and it is gratifying to see that she is quickly achieving the kind of recognition her distinction deserves.

In the foreword to her chapbook manuscript, Gardening at Dusk, which I selected for the new Wells College Press Emerging Writers Series, I wrote: "The reader of Christina Pugh's poetry enters a realm of change, mystery, and beauty. Objects metamorphose—flowers, paintings, a forgotten dress—melding into the unfamiliar while remaining, or becoming, luminous versions of what they already are. Language is the agent of these transformations, and language, and the ways we use and are used by it, is the subject of many of her poems. In them and through them, we experience a poet's wonder at words; we accompany her in her process of discovery and creation where words unfurl into images which transmute into languages we can inhabit…"

—Bruce Bennett, author of six books of poems and sixteen poetry chapbooks, Associate Editor at State Street Press, and Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Wells College in Aurora, New York.