Latest Poetry Collection
“In her stunning new collection, No Known Coordinates, Maria Terrone explores reversals —‘the world outside this window/like a photo’s negative.’ An urban street becomes a painting. A subway speeds from underground to an elevated track. A girl becomes a woman. A daughter cares for a mother. I love the way these poems bear witness to ‘the long, slow erasure’ of so much in our lives. With vivid, musical language, Terrone takes us to ‘that last waiting room: /land of no known coordinates,’ a place of hope and transformation.”
— Nicole Cooley
“ ‘When I dive into reflections, I feel most alive,’ Maria Terrone confesses in No Known Coordinates, a collection of poems in which dreams, memories, and visions take on a ghostly power. Drawn to the past, Terrone misses nothing in the present — not ‘squirrel click and sparrow peep,’ not a toy gun left in a garden, not a fellow subway rider’s shoes. With poise and candor, her poems also acknowledge an uncertain future: ‘I saw how light & dark/could shift into a new pattern and then/how that pattern could lift away.’ In language of crystalline clarity, Terrone’s lights and darks encompass fragility and toughness, trauma and wonder.”
— Rachel Hadas
“Maria Terrone’s new book No Known Coordinates opens with ‘Under the El,’ a poem that introduces the setting and theme for much of what follows. The poet evokes what she saw as a baby in a carriage pushed by her mother through the streets of New York, ‘saw’ in the sense of what she noticed ‘everywhere my gaze fell’ and what she intuitively understood: ‘the flux / we’re born to.’ Through observation and memory, Terrone brings all her experiences to life with a ‘hyper-vigilant look.’ That pinpoint vision and the meticulous articulation of her lines beautifully render everything from ‘What We Wear in the Subway’ to the birds and trees of the urban environment, pigeons and hawks and a dogwood whose blossoms are ‘still a painter’s brushwork of becoming.’ And throughout the book, we encounter a rich variety of other subjects like an imagined dinner of Poe with Thomas Jefferson and tender evocations of the poet’s aging mother. No Known Coordinates is a feast for readers who crave the sensual insights that only poetry can offer.”
— Elton Glaser
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Reviews
“It’s a book in praise of warblers and pigeons, of clarity and mystery. I like finding myself in this book, and getting lost there, with No Known Coordinates, by Maria Terrone.”
Escape Into Life
“Maria Terrone has written a collection that I experienced as both poetry and spirit photography, a collection that insists on kindness, believing that a shift will come, a star, a kiss.”
Ovunque Siamo: New Italian-American Writing
“Maria Terrone has been one of the Hudson Review’s stellar poets since we began publishing her work in 2002. What captured our interest in her poems was how she transformed and elevated observations and experiences, even objects, from daily life and brought them to a higher plain with deeper meanings. She is one of Henry James’s ‘People on whom nothing is lost.’
Added to her exquisite choice of language, with elegance and clarity, is the empathy she expresses for others both in the present and the past.”
Excerpted Remarks by Paula Deitz, Hudson Review Editor, from No Known Coordinates Book Launch