Rotten Perfect Mouth is a wonderfully fresh first book by a writer with an intuitive ear for colourful, musical language. These poems are loose enough for the reader to flop down inside and stay awhile. They are plangent, personal, confessional, noisy, nostalgic, and maybe a little bit broken. They often contain boats and travel and Toronto (street names and railroad tracks, dives and parks and kitchens) because those are the sorts of things Eva H.D. is drawn to. In Rotten Perfect Mouth, readers will discover a writer with her heart on her sleeve and her hand on her pen, capturing the world around her with vibrant immediacy.
Praise for Eva H.D.:
"There is no greater verbal-sensual rush than discovering a great poet, and the mysterious Eva H.D. is that. Her poem '38 Michigans,' an achingly bittersweet lament, won the Montreal International Poetry Prize [in 2015], with the sole judge, Irish poet Eavan Boland, saying of it, 'The whimsy itself suggests that grief has found a voice and is making its own reality with a devil-take-the-hindmost defiance.' And the collection Rotten Perfect Mouth is a miraculous calling forth of melancholy, but drenched with dry wit, very Toronto and deeply musical. Poetry find of the year, easily."-John Doyle, The Globe and Mail
"Inventive, intelligent, and crackling with energy, the poems in The Natural Hustle invite the reader to pay close attention to those everyday experiences and interactions we might otherwise pass over. They do so in language that is rich with all the energy of the Beats, a brilliant, humming, at times vulgar musicality."-Pat Lowther Memorial Award Jury
"Eva H.D. uses an economy of words to suggest an entire world of light and darkness, of longing and pain and beauty. Her poetry reminds me to look at small things: the ripple of water in a pond, the colour of a blue spruce right before sunrise, the quiet despair in the eyes of a person I pass on the street, the texture of the lime green chewing gum I stepped on while looking at the quiet despair in the eyes of that person I passed on the street."-Charlie Kaufman, author of Antkind, writer/director of Synecdoche, New York
"Eva H.D. [is] a poet of extraordinary merit and ability, and an artist of the first order."-Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Homeland Elegies
"Eva is an extraordinary pirate queen who is restlessly on a quest to swim in the unchartered moments that often are hidden within the habitual monotony of the everyday."-Jessie Buckley
