Her Infinite Variety by Malcolm Glass

In Malcolm Glass’s Her Infinite Variety, “A single / frame” cannot tell the fullness of our conflicts, wounds, journeys, rebirths, or resolutions. Thus, with a photographer’s probing gaze, a playwright’s understanding of character, and a poet’s hope for words, Glass studies those shadowy, murky intersections that too often define human relationships—the “tribulations and trials” still plaguing the Edens we establish and tend. Though we may “carefully arrange” our ephemeral lives and loves, as his poem attest, we are never secure, never certain. Knowing—whatever it turns out to be—is full of grime and glory and all the ways time pushes us forward as we falter, as we continue on, as we still seek the “strange and wonderful ways life connects us.”

–Jeff Hardin, author of Watermark: Poems (Madville Publishing, 2022)

Boots and Keds. Rusted out trucks and amber perfume. Malcolm Glass’s Her Infinite Variety is an homage to the lived experiences of women everywhere – women who pursue their missing fathers, mourn their lost babies, and interrogate love in its many forms. In this seamless hybrid collection, Glass’s stepmoms and goddesses, little girls and queens, slip in and out of shadow and starlight, boundlessly beckoning to his readers, “Stand with me/ in the violet flame of rebirth.”

–Joanna Grisham, author of Phantoms (Finishing Line Press, 2023)