Comments on Path of Totality:
“This poet speaks from the most terrible grief, losing a child, in the most direct way possible. When language begins to fail, she does not fall silent, but moves into a startling metaphorical knowledge: ‘What are you supposed to call the feeling / When you see a star and realize that it corresponds to a map / That it’s just one point in a huge map / Extending over everything like an enormous dark skull.’ The poems are often not dark or sad. Yet they all feel achieved by means of an utterly terrible price. When I read their harrowing truths, I remember the irrefutable necessity of poetry.” —Matthew Zapruder, author of Father’s Day and Why Poetry
“The exquisitely lyric Path of Totality is as gentle and tender as it is fierce and potent . . . Genre feels less important than the shape and shaping of language itself, and Path of Totality is a container woven to fit the content perfectly. ” —Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne
“It seems impossible this book was written, and with such grace and startling beauty. Amidst utter devastation and pain—hope, even humor emerges, and tenderness for others, and the other-than-human. These poems are the sunflowers growing up through the abyss.” —Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts
“These poems are blisteringly clear, devastated, and oracular, and they brim with the kindness that comes after terrible enlightenment.” —Sarah Manguso, author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments
“You hold this book but this book also holds you . . . This book is alive, as painful as that might be to its brilliant writer.” —Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum