Orion poetry editor Camille Dungy lists The Badass Brontës among recommendations for National Poetry Month 2023
“In this delightful and informative collection of well-researched and finely crafted poems, Jane Satterfield both widens and deepens my understanding of the reasons it is impossible to untether the lives of Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë and their family from the landscape, climate, and greater-than-human bounty of their simultaneously small and enormous world.”
Charles Rammelkamp reviews The Badass Brontës in Compulsive Reader
“Jane Satterfield vividly brings the Brontë sisters to life, showing them as quietly iconoclastic women in early nineteenth century England, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. While providing background in “dramatis personae” sketches and an historical outline at the end of the book, as well as copious illuminating epigraphs to many of the poems, it is through the poems themselves that the sisters jump off the page and feel contemporary. Whether it’s a villanelle about “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever” inspired by a Kate Bush song, a poem about the model home in a Maryland housing development (“Own the Charlotte Brontë”), a poem imagining Emily wearing tattoos (“Emily Inked”), or a poem inspired by an internet quiz for young fans (“Which Brontë Sister Are You?”), the sisters appear to walk among us! Environmental issues, women’s rights, women’s reproductive health (“The Consequences of Desire/ Brontë Bodies”), human rights, all important contemporary concerns, likewise figure into the depiction of the sisters.”
Emari DiGiogio reviews Apocalypse Mix in Tupelo Quarterly
“Apocalypse Mix is masterful and timely collection, urging the reader, and aspiring poets-of-witness, to examine one’s daily connection and larger history with resistance and struggle. Jane Satterfield’s poems do not ask us to engage with conflict and war from a distance; they smartly invite us in through our common landscape and routine and ask us to consider where we stand.”
Heidi Czerweic reviews Apocalypse Mix in Literary Matters
“Apocalypse Mix is a unique book written at a unique moment—a century since World War I, and during a rising wave of potentially disastrous nationalism in Europe and the U.S.—and a book written by a poet in a unique position to appreciate these parallels.”
Rachel Wooley reviews Apocalypse Mix in Atticus Review
Apocalypse Mix “is a great mix of wit, observation, memory, and history, masterful narrative poetry which feels incredibly current and relevant in a time where so many of our experiences are held at arm’s length, at the distance of a lens or screen.”
Philip Belcher reviews Apocalypse Mix in Shenandoah
“Apocalypse Mix is an ambitious book, and readers who accept its challenges will be rewarded amply.”
Adrianne Kalfopoulou reviews Her Familiars in Verse Wisconsin
“Jane Satterfield’s third collection of poetry, Her Familiars, explores and expands discourses of the feminine, and feminist reconstructions of historical events, as it mines, too, personal moments in the poet’s world… Satterfield “un-domesticates” the domestic moment, which subverts assumptions of domesticity as a space that limits, or tames, vision.”
Lauren Hilger reviews Her Familiars in Green Mountains Review
“Jane Satterfield’s third collection, Her Familiars, is comprised of poems that range in style from full use of the page to the villanelle and sestina. These poems often address the experiences of women, both historical and contemporary. Satterfield’s received forms, neat as needlepoint, do not shy away from discussing topics including emigration, colonialism, and the enormity of torture and bombings.”
Caitlin Doyle reviews Her Familiars in The Common
“Throughout her impressive body of work, which includes three collections of poetry and a memoir, Jane Satterfield explores the roles of place and gender in human identity. Born in England and raised in America, she probes what it means to reconcile the legacies of intertwined lineages…Her Familiars…widens her range of subject matter, tones, and aesthetic approaches, mining the territory between domestic and public life in striking new ways…Satterfield shines as a poet when drawing unique parallels across the centuries, placing surprising details in relation to each other so that her poems achieve a densely layered complexity.”