"...this breath of fresh air, this right to innocence, obtained of course through difficult struggle I have always appreciated in these immense transatlantic poets ... a similar “oxygenation” in the poems of Steve Light."

                                                                          Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

"Michael Keenan is a reborn troubadour…I always thought his poems silvery and charitable…I admire their lateral drift, their intimate evocation of names, their evanescence."

                                                                              C.D. Wright

"Beth Benedix is a professor of religious studies, world literature and community engagement and in her book Ghost Writer (A Story about Telling a Story), she explores the ethics of narrative."

                                                                     examiningethics.org

"A compelling mix of critical theory and personal remembrances..."

                                                        Lambda Literary

"What appear to be loosely woven pieces of philosophy and bits of untold historical drama have a way of revealing something elemental about human perception and the art of storytelling itself."

                                                                      Zone 3

"Notes focuses on those energies in art that enact image spaces and spatiotemporal alterations in which life is never quite what it seems to be."

                                                                                                  Brendan Moran

"This is a treasure, a caravanserai of a book, erudite, personal, enlightening."

                                                                               Anne Waldman

"...an astringent perspective on post-feminism, late capitalism, global unemployment, and the overall ennui of males who have yet to find traction in a chaotic Zeitgeist."

                                                 Good Times, Santa Cruz

It’s rare to be so enmeshed in reading a novel, and rarer still in one whose sentences you covet, whose words are like precious stones.

                                                                                  Vincent Katz

Jordan Blum speaks with Spryszak about Edju, Thrice Fiction, the debate over paying/non-paying journals, the world of surrealist writing, music, and much more.

                                                       Cover to Cover podcast

“...these beautifully constructed stories—profound, humane, dark, and yet illuminated by love and belief in humanity—bring us into the heart of the global catastrophes facing our species and our planet today.”

                                                             Amy Wilentz

“So rich, so plentiful in terms of its rhythms, emotions, images, transitions, its subtlety. A very giving novel, a lot for the reader, this reader to think on.”

                                                                                                  Norma Cole

“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