What People Are Saying

Carolyn Forché

Eduardo C. Corral

Carolyn Forché

This is a new-century work, a voicing of Barbara Cully's tidal sense of the temporal, her premonitory stillness, written by desert and sea-light, inscribing the endurance of loss, the necessity of vigilance. Her images are beautiful and precise, her sensibility profound.

Diane Seuss

Eduardo C. Corral

Carolyn Forché

…the speaker (Melissa Studdard in Dear Selection Committee) revels in her largesse…All of this immensity, this grand unburying, is squeezed into the prosaic corseting structure of a job application, intensifying the split between tame and wild…Indeed, these poems are so desirous and animated that they spilled over the edges of the page and into my thirsty soul.

Eduardo C. Corral

Elegant, clear-eyed, and restless, Suzanne Frischkorn’s poems seek and illuminate the frayed hyphens fastening us to family, to the world. Her searching is psychologically rich, transformative: an iridescent interiority spirals outward to touch what sustains it, what divides it. Structurally brilliant, alive with lyrical thinking and observations, Fixed Star is ample proof of Frischkorn’s poetic gifts. In her hands, language is light.

Denise Duhamel

Eduardo C. Corral

InThe Ars Magna for the Manifold Dimensions of z, Neil de la Flor gives us a braided history of the speaker and his beloved Meta....de la Flor conjures a lovingly hybrid picture of Meta and the Danish Underground Resistance during the Holocaust. As the poet learns more about his heritage, we as readers learn more about American families and the pasts they carry, what our elders have taught us and what has (and perhaps always will) remain a mystery.

Jed Perl

Denise Duhamel

Carol Frost

Jean McGarry squeezes a heightened reality—a truthfulness, a naturalness—out of her flair for the strange and the bizarre…she shows us that the truth is crazy. Blue Boy is a wild ride of a book.

Carol Frost

Denise Duhamel

Carol Frost

The book is spellbinding. I'm in awe of the research and subsequent detailing that goes into it. It's a moving tribute to that richness William Maxwell talks about in human experience. The American Experience is another strong subject-the losses incurred by our peripatetic lives. I sense the necessity behind the story being told-not just the author wanting to know better her own mother and understand her, but cutting the tethers of the self and soaring into the reader's interest in universal questions. I really couldn't stop reading it, and I'll keep it with me for a long time to come.

Joanna Scott

Caridad Moro-Gronlier

What an insightful and spellbinding novel Megan Weiler has written. The Tuscan countryside, beautifully rendered in vivid detail, is infused with mysteries that are pursued with patient, inexorable attention. The Spring is richly, deliciously rewarding.

Caridad Moro-Gronlier

Told with her singular wit and wisdom honed by salt and sun and brine, the poems are besotted with Florida-its superhero pelicans, the rum-macerated retirees baking in the sun, the soundtrack of air-conditioning, and a lover's night terrors playing in an oceanside efficiency. The speaker in these poems is love-laden but clear-eyed....

Lee Ann Roripaugh

Caridad Moro-Gronlier

Lee Ann Roripaugh

Caroline Goodwin's Old Snow, White Sun is a stunningly beautiful book that calls upon the power of naming as both a form of perdurability and representation of flux. In a time of environmental and personal erosion, these gorgeous poems form an elegiac charm against loss while honoring cycles of restoration and transformation.