Automotive by Ceridwen Hall

“Ceridwen Hall conducts metamorphoses both subtle and, like ice obscured beneath snow dust, perilous in their clarity. In “Visibility,” she writes, “There is nothing exact/ about transformation”, and yet, in these poems exploring a familial history’s myriad, muted turmoil, Hall trains her patient and exacting gaze on the shifting and elusive contours of the self. Lucid and crystalline, Automotive, unnerves and compels with deliberate and unflinching stillness.”

–Paula Mendoza, author of Play for Time

“Automobile already means self-moving” Ceridwen Hall writes.  These glass-clear, intimate poems track the mind through memory and lived experience.  Filled with precise attention and an elegant understatement, Hall’s poems reward contemplation and unhurried reading.  Her poems say in plain language what we have not considered before: “Arrival is also departure” or “Anger is one way / to keep awake, uncertainty another.”  Readers will find Hall’s keen perceptions resonant and rewarding.

–Janice Harrington, author of Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin and The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home

In Ceridwen Hall‘s AUTOMOTIVE, American car culture transforms from Route 66’s neon lights and slick salesmen into a tender meditation of the ways machines separate us from the very world they allow us to explore. Whether in the passenger seat or behind the wheel, Hall’s speakers reach out from the spaces between “impersonating or becoming” to examine the physical, emotional, and spiritual ways we move and are moved.

–Jessica Rae Bergamino, author of UNMANNED