Burnside Soleil, “On Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird.” legible peculiar reviews, January 20, 2023.
The poet is witness, documentarian, participant, mystic, woman and more, but also caught like a “wire in the trees.”
Rob McLennan, “Claire Marie Stancek, wyrd] bird.” rob mclennan's blog, February 4, 2022.
This really is a stunning collection, one that works a unique complexity and depth through such dark, amid the searching, stretching and attending.
Sara Judy, “Make of this Language a Shrine: A Review of The Wheel and wyrd] bird.” Entropy Mag, October 5, 2021.
[wyrd] bird] is invested in language which only makes sense in the company of others, which is disinvested in the power of the individual lyric speaker, and fully committed to being in relationship to other people. Stancek [is] not [a] solitary figure[], rather, [she is] entangled in the world, and a chorus of voices speak to and through [her].
Tracy Zeman, “wyrd] bird.” Colorado Review, 2021.
At the heart of this dense, polyphonic, sonorous text is permeability and ambiguity about living, sensing and feeling, good and evil, and an underlying truth that all phenomena are to a degree overlapping and blurred. Broken chords layered on a “greengrey” “greygreen” world. Stancek’s work defies any easy categorization; it makes and unmakes, momentarily defines and then blends.
Library Journal’s “some of the best work coming in 2020”
Don’t miss outrageously word-hungry Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird.
Kristina Marie Darling, “Voice, Alterity, & Appropriation: Recent Books by Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ming Holden, & Claire Marie Stancek.” The Literary Review, November 12, 2018.
Stancek . . . conjures through – and is conjured by – her accomplished and innovative approach to poetic craft.
Alexandra Mattraw, “Runes in the noise menagerie: A review of Claire Marie Stancek’s Oil Spell.” Jacket2, October 29, 2018.
It’s as if she asks: what would intersectional resistance against systemic violence look like if it was sung into poems? She answers with questions in the shape of polyphonic text, but her apocalyptic poetics are not without beauty.
In Oil Spell, form becomes a revolutionary act that deforms.
“Oil Spell.” Publisher’s Weekly, May 7, 2018.
Like a fiendish deejay, [Stancek] mixes the discourses of drone warfare, environmental crisis, English Romanticism, and American mass media culture to produce poems that thrum and careen across the page.
Lindsay Choi, “Poet, teacher Claire Stancek talks power of words, ‘Mouths.’” Daily Californian, February 12, 2015.
“She is unwilling to be frivolous or to regard anything as trivial — though she can be very witty, and she has an enormous capacity for delight,” wrote Stancek’s mentor Lyn Hejinian in an email to The Daily Californian. “She is gloomy about the future, but her writing is unnervingly beautiful.”