"These assured poems do not read like a debut, as the collection expertly gathers ideas, objects, and affects of one body to converge histories and agonies, just as [Harriet] Tubman leads a group at Combahee 'moving as one black body against the wind.'"--Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation
"By dedication, love, and craft. Amanda Gunn places her poetry in conversation with the farming and culinary skills of her forebears: women who cultivated land, survival, strength, and family bonds."--Poetry Unbound
"Flesh, kin, refuge."--Ms. Magazine
"Here is another deeply intimate collection of poems, this one a debut from Amanda Gunn. Broken into six parts, one for each of the senses, the voices and forms change drastically from page to page. These poems feel very much in the body, the body of Gunn and the body of the reader, all at once. They also explore and interrogate the history of race in America."--Book Riot
"Meditating on kitchens and perfume, grief and romance novels, and family and memory, I found Gunn's debut collection luminous."--Book Riot
"Things I Didn't Do with This Body is the kind of book that so deftly dazzles at the level of language, one might miss the devastating current that pumps through its thumping heart. Plumbing the depths of both personal ancestry and the larger legacy of Black suffering and resilience, Gunn reveals--and revels in--the impossibility of interiority outside of history, history outside the slow accretion of distinct individual experiences. . . . Things I Didn't Do with This Body interrogates the self not to exalt its unique suffering, but to stake out solid ground on a trembling planet."--Rain Taxi
"Things I Didn't Do with this Body tackles serious subjects: race, sexuality, gender, aesthetics, societal and personal depictions and interpretations of the body, and any number of other Big Themes; Gunn handles this repertoire with skill, verve, intelligence and wry humor. And yet what I love most about this collection is the granular details of her memories and descriptions."--David Starkey, California Review of Books