In the Huffington Post’s contemporary poetry reviews column, Seth Abramson brilliantly wrote up Rachel B. Glaser’s book, Pee On Water—which, of course, is not a book of poetry. But Abramson’s eight paragraph review is a rally cry for opening the discourse about poetry to include fiction by poets. He says that book reviewers shouldn’t be beholden to the marketing teams that classify a book’s genre. About Pee On Water specifically he writes:
On the inside flap of this reviewer’s copy of Pee on Water some unknown soul has written the words, “Why, and who, picks up a book like this?” The collection’s briefly-offputting title notwithstanding, it’s a surprising question, as the reasons for picking up Pee on Water are obvious and legion–just as there are several obvious reasons Glaser’s collection was named a Top 20 Reader’s Choice Selection by hip-lit’s The Believer. Few other texts, whether conventionally poetic or conventionally prosaic, so regularly subvert reader expectations in mid-sentence, acknowledge the unique taste of each English word and construction, participate so joyously in the rhythm-making activities of language, or revel so artfully in the juxtapositive strangenesses of daily living. These sentences sing the way stanzas do, and their song mesmerizes the way the very best lines of verse do and have done for centuries.
