Thin Glass unfolds in the after-hours of a city: neon signs blinking, windows open to the street, sidewalks slick with rain. In this lyric coming-of-age, Degenaars writes with clarity and vulnerability about those caught between responsibility and abandon, love and self-erasure.
These poems follow a speaker in flux-lover, daughter, would-be mother-as she questions what it means to survive, and even celebrate, the in-between. “Despite all I’ve tried, I am myself. Still,” the speaker confesses, reckoning with a self she can’t quite shake.
Degenaars searches for meaning in the small details-hailing a cab, folding laundry, changing in a window. This is a collection about how ordinary life can break us open, an unforgettable meditation on what can’t be left behind. These poems are emotionally exact and quietly defiant; they explore how longing threatens and shapes us. “Who’d hide from this,” the speaker asks, “the almost tender-who’d dare?”
Christine Degenaars is a rarity in contemporary poetry. She never gets lost in her own turbulent mind or succumbs to the temptation to see herself as “special.” Instead, her version of being “personal” is to focus outward, on the world, embodying her own subjective life through wonderfully original, precise, and skilful description of what’s “out there.” In her poem “No Frost on the Cars, Not Yet,” a poem about prospective motherhood and the doubt and fear attendant on being a mother, she imagines her yet to be born daughter as a young woman out on the town, stumbling “out of some foreign place,” and then seeing “her head haloed, a shadow in plowed snow.” The quiet brilliance of this line, in which the halos we think we wear are really just shadows cast on bulldozed, dirty snow, illustrates perfectly how ambivalent feeling can be transformed into lively, rueful, self-confrontational poetry. This is a fine first book, smart, felt, an exhilarating and challenging read!
Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch and The Land Between Two Rivers
Thin Glass by Christine Degenaars, is an astonishing read. Here, the poet considers everyday reality-the sidewalks of Manhattan, the subway, Carmine Street in April, antique shops along Bleecker-with a sensibility that leads her to luminous discovery enhanced by the sacred. “I am an I that is exploding with song,” she writes, and the music of her lines attests to that sublime surge. The invention of a self, the ache of love, the startling epiphany in “The Lifeguards,”-these are high moments in a beautiful first book.
Grace Schulman, author of Again, the Dawn and The Marble Bed
It’s a thin glass that separates us from the lives of others, suggests Christine Degenaars in this searching, beautifully observed collection. Intimate, conversational, these poems are fueled by desire, curiosity, a fascination with transgression, and a hunger for the sacred.
Donna Masini, author of Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?
Thin Glass by Christine Degenaars examines the fragility of everyday life. Degenaars’ poems explore both the domestic and the profound, searching for equal meaning in love, betrayal, heartache, and beginnings. These poems examine the meandering journey from girlhood to womanhood and highlight the paradoxes of love and intimacy. The lyrical intensity and evocative images create a melancholy glimpse into both the alluring nature of love and its dangerous reality. Thin Glass shows the many ways that our images shape who we are and what we want to become while we still have the time to change.
Vanessa Ogle, author of Mother of O
Christine Degenaars
has work published in Cider Press Review, Epiphany, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. She was nominated for the 2023 Pushcart Prize and in 2022 was selected as a semi-finalist in the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. She graduated from Hunter College with a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry. Thin Glass is her debut collection. She lives in New York.