"[The] poems that make up All Souls start when and where they want to, go where they will, break off in what should have been a middle but isn't, and then not stop, exactly, but disappear, like the little blips and half-signals that were transmitted by Amelia Earhart as she flew ... where?"–David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review
"Remarkable. . . . With astonishing formal and emotional clarity, in language at once delicate and bold, Hamilton renders afresh enduring questions of time, love, and literature as measures of our individual and shared lives."
–The New Yorker, Best Books of 2023 "
All Souls is a devastating reminder of one's own mortality, written by a writer who has gone too soon."
–Time, "100 Must-Read Books of 2023" "The most moving reading experience I had in 2023 was Saskia Hamilton's poetry collection,
All Souls. . . . [It] is exquisitely and adventurously formed."
–Anthony Domestico, Commonweal "Extraordinary. . . . [
All Souls] is a dramatic rendering of Hamilton as both a writer and a reader, a rhapsodic conversation between her library and her life."
–Declan Ryan, Poetry Foundation "Full of delicate and muscular truths and graced with rare intelligence, this posthumous volume offers the gifts of a uniquely sensitive mind."
–Publishers Weekly, starred review
"[Hamilton's] meditative mode offers a deliberately slower and more languorous way of experiencing the signature whetted angularity, emotive compression, and deep intellect of her work. . . . Reading these poems after the poet's death proves that while poetry cannot stop the journey or change the destination, it does have the power to preserve the mind at its most alive."
–James Ciano, Los Angeles Review of Books "These works are worldly, intimate, domestic, and mortal. It's remarkable how much Hamilton makes of so little; if only all our lives were this rich in particulars recorded in detail. . . . How admirable the composure of the line, the principled refusal to imagine the end possessing more gravitas than something so ordinary as waking."
–Michael Autrey, Booklist
"A deeply philosophical and introspective window into mortality. . . .
All Souls is an ethereal end to Hamilton's much-lauded career, a collection which refuses a clean and coherent exit, a book that will quickly establish itself as what Dickinson dubbed 'vital light' destined to 'inhere as do the Suns-'"
–Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question "
All Souls, the posthumously published final volume of poems by Saskia Hamilton, conveys a richness of stories in beautifully captured vignettes."
–BookPage