I set this book down and wept. In Peril as Architectural Enrichment, Hazel White contracts English space to a steeple, the "blue chicory-like flowers," a "pollen grain," then extends it beyond the provenance of sight. Into: a "panorama, equal to exile." A "space" that "opens thoroughly to another." Why does Hazel White's writing make me cry? It is the first work of experimental writing I have read that is set in the place I am from. More than this, the tenderness with which White moves between what is enclosed, and what is "spread," embodies both planetary time and its gravity: the body's "dirt" and "damaged cells." Its "open rose." Its hybridity. The "leaf light" that illuminates the "right shoulder." The "left hip." Rosehips. Blackbirds. Cow parsley. This book is the most beautiful piece of writing I have read in many years.—Bhanu Kapil
Hidden as the child hides, unbound and sheltered by highest leafy privacy—a tree dome's thrill of height, marigolds, pastures and Trumpeter swans once hers—Hazel White's probing poems are threaded with truant questions of land-space, its laws and the tilt proposed between one trained mind's certainty of being in-place, and another's admission to not wanting to know where the edge is. White's poems are dense with physical particulars of linguistic history, horticulture, architecture, and musical echo.—Kathleen Fraser