"Jorie Graham's poems are philosophically and historically alert, and their acts of thought arise with almost instinctual urgency from an astonished responsiveness that in itself becomes part of what she names 'the vivid performance of the present.'... Reaching with quickened sensitivity for poetry's supply of the associative, sonic, and formal properties rustling beyond mere denotation, she also develops a genius for apprehending and scrutinizing human perceptions, reflections, and desires.....Graham's poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have." -- New York Times Book Review

"One of the best, and most intelligent, poets in the language.... She is like no one else, neither in her rhythms nor in her insistence on opening up, scrutinizing, and even reversing our experience of time and space." -- Times Literary Supplement (London)

"This collection, read beginning to end, read as a kind of novel, as a roman, is breathtakingly clear, crystalline, and compelling.... Those of us who knew best the more recent large and complex Graham poems are now invited to reread the earlier, and to see in them, perhaps for the first time, their full complexities and compulsions." -- Boston Review

"Everything comes together here - the voice like the wind that somehow marshalls itself out of kitchen daydreams and prosaic events into utterance that swings with the conviction of Blake's... [Graham] is one of the finest poets writing today." -- John Ashbery

"Graham's complex, faceted poems glint powerfully with compressed energy and suggest another meaning for the term atmospheric pressure." -- Publishers Weekly