The Itinerant Girl’s Guide
to Self-Hypnosis
Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014
“Balancing outward and inward looking, playfulness and vulnerability, strange intimacy and gauzy disconnection, Joanna Penn Cooper’s The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis builds a moody and tender ladder. These lyric shorts recall the New York School with their arrays of noticings and exultancies and knobbly, vivid particulars, yet they also feel wholly fresh and surprising, and of Cooper’s own nimble and provocative making. This is a wonderful collection.”
— Paula McLain,
author of The Paris Wife
“Reminiscent of a contemporary Scout Finch, the speaker is self-aware and defiant. ‘I may have been born chronically homesick,’ she says, ‘But don’t tell me I don’t know happy.’ Shifting in and out of the present time and tense, she is moved partly of her own accord and partly by the thrust of time and circumstance. ‘Itinerant’ defines travel as circuitous, looping, and repetitive. And so this piece of lyrical fiction is allowed—encouraged, even—to frustrate expectations of linear narrative, as if a villanelle rendered in prose. Reaching back, the speaker casts fresh eyes on her past. Reaching forward, she acknowledges the boundaries of her vision.”
— Laurie Saurborn Young,
from her review in American Microreviews & Interviews