Jaimee Hills’ new collection of poems, How to Avoid Speaking, is a brightly enjoyable work that grapples with, well, speaking, but also the embodied female experience and the weirdness of art and pop culture. Winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, a highly competitive competition from the excellent Waywiser Press, the Milwaukee writer’s book manages to set playful language alongside heavy, difficult-to-articulate topics. Her poem “Derrida Eats a Dorito” works in a way that I wish more contemporary poetry would: It manages to be academic in its referencing of famed deconstructionist Jacques Derrida but reminds readers that poetry can be fun in its thoughtfulness or even seriousness.
It’s Hills’ love of the sonic and of wordplay that keeps the collection buoyant and surprising. This is not the dry and dusty stuff we may hazily recall from our high school English classes; Hills’ poems are unique and bouncy and generally pleasurable in a way that will undoubtedly lend itself well to a poetry reading.
