The poems in Liza Hudock’s Reveille offer an unvarnished look at the tenacious ties that bind us to family, home, and to ways of talking.
Praise for Reveille
“Her magnificently chilly, sonically self-assured, and justifiably, even righteously, bitter debut follows Yeats’s advice and still sounds nothing like him, nor like any other American with comparable gifts. It’s a blast of fresh air, stark and serious and drab and determined to flourish, like prairie flowers. Sometimes the poems find figures for Hudock’s experience in that hardy vegetation, or else in the beasts of the wood.” —Stephanie Burt, The Georgia Review
“Liza Hudock’s debut collection, “Reveille,” reflects on ordinary life with such humility that her artfulness sneaks up on you like a coyote at twilight. Caring for her mom, washing wool blankets, tending her pumpkin patch — in such quotidian acts, Hudock finds what she calls ‘clear immutable truth.’” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
The authority of these remarkable poems is wrapped up in their matter-of-fact tone — neither dismissive, nor casual about grief, but made taut by Hudock’s effort to find meaning, to place her losses among the vast machinery of days and habits, to demonstrate that she doesn’t just belong to her sorrows, but that she also belongs to us. —Chris Waddington, On the Seawall
“Reveille has all the urgency of a rescue boat searching for souls lost at sea. It seeks — out of both duty and faith — while believing there is something to find, while believing truth can be known. I should not have waited so long to let it find me.” —Steven Leyva, Washington Independent Review of Books
“Reveille is thoroughly satisfying, obsessive in its gaze. Hudock has introduced herself in this debut as a poet who never takes the easy way out.” —Karen Hildebrand, LitStack
Hudock’s poems have this startling quality that’s sort of like when you walk outside into strong sunlight after a slow and dark morning. An apt reading experience for a book that focuses on grief and the passing of time after death. —Cecilia Smith, RHINO
“I love Liza Hudock’s poems, for their tact and their feeling, their amusement and curiosity, their skill and attractive oddity, their clarity and complication, their fascinations and quiet audacities, all in the service of thinking about—among other things—family relationships, familial troubles, and the experience of great loss. At any given time, poets, maybe especially young poets, can start to seem a great deal like one another in their subjects and techniques, but Hudock’s Reveille seems to me a book like no one else’s, of this or, really, any moment. She’s the real thing.”—Daisy Fried
"Liza Hudock is an original, rare as midnight lace obsidian. Her poems are spare, taut, denuded of ornament. The world, in poem after poem, somehow transfigures into the personal with startling effect. Wonder abounds. A magnificent, memorable debut."—August Kleinzahler
"Here is a world in which the dead mother’s angel arrives in the 'clean, bright mouths' of the dogs, in which 'mycelium adorns the roots like a lace glove.’ Elegy or ode, personal history or menagerie—these pithy poems are as elegant and wise as they are whimsical. It’s as if each line rides the razor-thin balance between inevitability and surprise. 'White wisp in the corner of my eye. / I try to look at it directly and it’s gone.' I really love these poems. They make me feel more alive. Liza Hudock’s Reveille is a standout debut.”—Sally Keith