reviews
2022 Indigenous Voices Awards
Jurors Comments, Girl running (excerpt)
"...inventive...
and visually fascinating..."
CV2 Magazine
Summer 2022
Elena Bentley
"Peripheral Drifts and Blooms:
A Review of Girl running"
(excerpt)
"….highly affective and haunting... the collection’s energy crescendos, owing in large part to the inclusion of the mother’s final words…Tegenkamp’s beautifully crafted lyrical ruminations drift from the periphery and bloom into focus, with a style that is both “telluric and tender,” strange and familiar… Ultimately, the poet succeeds in what they have set out to do: name that ongoing presence the dead leave behind."
Prairie Fire Magazine
March 2022
Mary Barnes
Review of Girl running
(excerpt)
"Diana Hope Tegenkamp’s debut book of poetry, Girl running, is a fascinating collection filled with vivid language and startling images that invites us to reflect on sudden disappearances, tender daily connections and spectral appearances which haunt and reveal… Tegenkamp also reminds us that the girl running is all of us, and in the time of running, the girl and the poet give us glimpses that can be rewarding, among them, in a camera shot, “buoyant shadow-shaped lung / exhaling a star-point bloom”, in a mother saying, “Try for balance,” in “a green Pontiac.” (3, 21, 28).
... These and other observations are but a few of the many sightings of lives lived and lost to shadows. Further readings can only bring more revelations which will intensify and solidify Tegenkamp as a poet to be recognized and admired."
Read the full review here.
Miramichi Reader
January 2022
Lisa Timpf
Review of Girl running
(excerpt)
"…subtle handling of themes like grief and dying… vivid language and imagery…Though some of the topic matter feels deeply personal, Tegenkamp provides enough space in the poems for the reader to find their own meanings... Evocative and powerful..."
Read the full review here.
SaskBooks Reviews
November 2021
Shelley A. Leedahl
Review of Girl running
(excerpt)
"The poems in this book appear in various shapes and forms, from couplets and tercets to the three, page-long “Loop” poems, which are dreamy, yummy, stream-of-consciousness prose poems inspired by Canadian poet Nicole Brossard’s work. Lines from Tegenkamp’s first “Loop” demonstrate her keen ear and eye, with special attention paid to the wind, colour, ordinary domestic scenes, the natural world, and philosophic leaps…
Tegenkamp’s debut book is luminous, partly because she juxtaposes the everyday—Mom pours coffee, puts cream and sugar/on the counter. Wipes the wink with a towel”—with insightful assertions— “Time, she says, does not flow in even measures,” but mostly because Tegenkamp’s just a damn fine writer."
Read the full review here.
Saskatchewan Poet
William Robertson
Response to Girl running
(excerpt)
“...new language [is] being invented... women’s voices, and the long-suppressed voices of the marginalized and unheard, are heard; are listened to. Like birds we didn’t pay attention to, stop, be quiet, and listen.
There’s so much here that, as it discovers your father and his background, questions and sidesteps white, male hegemony. You take that history by a “lady,” the long-accepted history by a woman who “fit” what was accepted by men at the time, and you run all that accepted history into an iceberg, one of the most famous examples of white, male hubris of all time.
Now that we’ve sunk that ship, let’s try acknowledging the beatings, of Métis boys and animals, of murdered and missing women and girls, here and on the Mexican desert, and invent a new way of doing things, from speaking, to writing, to putting the words on the page. Get out from under the Weight of Empires.
...A brave and lovely collection.”
Tentacular Magazine
January 2022
Tea Gerbeza
"On Its Own Terms, The Body Tells:
A Review of Diana Hope Tegenkamp’s UNMUTE: Warmups for Body Vocality"
(excerpt)
"While viewing Diana Hope Tegenkamp’s mesmerizing performance UNMUTE: Warmups for Body Vocality, I was captured by the body’s language as “gestures from the edge of speech” ...With the emphasis on “continuing” Tegenkamp rejects the silence previously enforced on the body and continues past the edges of speech into a new knowing: one of care, love, and creation. Tegenkamp’s performance gifts this new knowledge to viewers, and I know I will carry it close for days to come.
Read the full review here.