"[I]t’s a quick spin through Homolka’s spare, sculpted lines from the collection of Jews’ permits to the six-day war to “emaciated lovers” receiving stars from the backs of chariots. Clearly, history, and particularly Jewish history, will be the topic of this Kathryn A. Morton Prize winner, and clearly the language will be punchy and irreverent…. VERDICT: Refreshing, energetic work; many readers will enjoy."
—Library Journal
"Homolka’s alluring debut seamlessly tiles scenes of past and present to create a mosaic that is constantly conscious of the inescapability of time…. Aware that he is presenting perennial human questions in new imagery, Homolka lets his metaphors do the work so that the craft, not cleverness, shines through."
—Publishers Weekly
“Though timeless in its associations...this is a collection infused with the cyclical nature, and often unbearable passage, of time and an unflinching awareness of the horrors human beings can visit upon each other.... Thoughtful, piercing, and sometimes startling in its darker moments, this collection echoes long.”
—Booklist
“Homolka’s wry intelligence and off-kilter wit permeate these poems.”
—Harvard Review
“Antiquity unveils a rarefied realm where ancient and postmodern are lived simultaneously. Kaleidoscopic, lyrical, bold, meticulous and sensual, the poems are "flexible in (their) adherence/to a particular time period." Each poem is a dark aria from the opera of history. Sexual/political energy, rapt stanzas, the choreography of disaster, fatalism, persecution, seduction, and much more are contemplated by eternity's light. Each poem is a heady, mysterious, evocative cocktail of zeitgeists.”
—Amy Gerstler
“Steeped in the archetypal and the historical, this book straddles life’s rapacious uncertainties with a healthy dose of ambivalence towards patriarchal legacies, surviving on rations of wry wit (running the gamut from jovial to martial) as well as meticulous attentions/devotions to form. Homolka has thrown down his gauntlet, and this formidable debut, by hook and by crook, manages to transubstantiate the half-empty chalice into the half-full.”
—Timothy Liu
“The poems in Antiquity very much abandon themselves to language, to the collective poetic endeavor, and they do so in a rich, textured, and sustained voice, though out of a self that is “flexible in its adherence/ to a particular time period.” What’s antiquity anyway, but a thing that is always lurking beneath the surface, not only in the sense of its influence—then shaping now—but in the sense our now will so soon be a then. And what if this book, by virtue of its intelligence and in spite of its exhilaration, leaves us with a sense of spiritual weariness . . . wanting to be gladder and more puffed up? Consider most of all that if such wishes were granted, we wouldn’t have these marvelous poems, poems that remind us of how easy it is, really, to talk to Horace.”
—Mary Ruefle, from the Introduction
06/15/2016
"Everywhere in heaven's meadows/ Aryans jack each other off." So opens this debut collection's first poem, "Goshen," whose title references the region of ancient Egypt inhabited by the Israelites. Then it's a quick spin through Homolka's spare, sculpted lines from the collection of Jews' permits to the six-day war to "emaciated lovers" receiving stars from the backs of chariots. Clearly, history, and particularly Jewish history, will be the topic of this Kathryn A. Morton Prize winner, and clearly the language will be punchy and irreverent. How do we live with the burdens of history? "It isn't like that Horace Life stresses us out," says one poem in response to the classic poet's placidity; elsewhere, "I can't write off the gamey/ smell of events." VERDICT Refreshing, energetic work; many readers will enjoy.
