Enchantée is a dazzling book of metamorphoses. At first, Angie Estes’ words stand out bright as silver tacks on the page, and in the next instant her words shift and glide, turn sinuous, and trail in their wake startling perceptions about memory, sorrow, innocence, and knowledge. Any one of Estes’ poems may remind us of a gorgeous hanging garden—until the poem spans distances and evokes a sky starred with constellations. And then, in a blink, the poem shifts shape yet again.
—Lee Upton
Enchantée: you will be, when you meet these poems. The enchantment has to do with incantation: the way Angie Estes puts experience into song. She lets words take the initiative, as Mallarmé said poets must, to see where the secret logic of sound will lead. Ricocheting among languages, places, and time periods, the play is plangent, tinged by nostalgia historical and personal. But Estes is too fascinated with what is happening on the page, and the next one after that, too interested in poetry’s potential, to get hung up about the past. This is a poetry of style, elegance, and fresh surprise, for the ear and the eye, the heart and the mind. It reminds me why I read.
—Langdon Hammer
Stephen (Stephanie) Burt's "Nearly Baroque"
Publisher's Weekly review of Enchantée
Enchantée is recommended in Salon's Ultimate Book Guide for 2013.