“Memory has profound resonance in our time of relative truth, greed and indifference to history. This powerful book is more relevant than ever.”

                                                                               Meredith Monk

“While many of the situations described here seem familiar — a trip to CVS, a young daughter who explodes when told it's time for dinner — they're presented with an edginess and sharp intelligence that makes the poems pop.”

                                                                          Washington Post Book World

“...reminded of the haunts of an older world, of a world that is far less abstracted, far less buried, far more present, far more accessible. The elusive image, the Sugar Factory itself, a nothing-place filled with the nothing that is life, experience, and contentment.”

                                                                          Yellow Rabbits

“One might say that Hard Some, on the whole, is a book of sustained resistance, as much as it is about a sustained and thoughtful presence.”

                                                                     rob mclennan blog spot

"Shmailo’s technical skills pop on every page. She is in control of this insanity from the start, and to prove it she floods us with new icons created one after another like stamped plastic ducks. She creates an assembly line of literary riches. Genres and forms bend in and out with ease."

                                                                                  Ragazine

"Hilarious, wise, nuanced, magical, Jose Negroni’s writing has tapped into something remarkably deep and, alas, very hard to confront for today's disaffected youth..."

                                                                 Dennis Kucinich,

                                           eight-term congressman, and presidential candidate

"I need data, information—but that is not what I want from poetry or any art form. Yes, poetry has its crafty elements. But you shouldn’t see the machinations of craft right off. As for syntax? Syntax is a kind of music, is it not? And some music comes from a far country . . ."

                 Karen Garthe interviewed in Rain Taxi

"Kuppers transforms prose stories into lyric meditations in ways that are convincing and disarming in their beauty."

                                               PANK

"Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light is a testament to how poetry can take us where no other written work dares to tread."

  —San Francisco Book Review

"Along with viewing illuminated manuscripts and explorations of dazzling manifestations of light, Babbitt extols the joy of reading with a poet’s enthusiasm."

               —Colorado Review