"Whatever the heart symbolizes – conviction or affection – it's clear that language demands center stage. When at an impasse, Roberts follows her words in order to find a way out of suffering or conundrum. 'As you empty the thought or fill the feel, / you surround the hole of the mouth that wells up // and understand.' Emerson posited language as the 'vehicle of thought'; in Roberts's hyped-up version, language is as much 'spectacle' as 'vehicle.' Avoiding set rhyme schemes but staying within more or less uniform stanzas, Roberts devises sonic constellations out of internal rhyme and repetition. These episodic bursts cluster in spectacular patterns. Wordplay also disperses expectations, as when 'sunsettling' stands in for the more obvious 'unsettling.' Like Clark Coolidge, whose verve depends on malapropism, neologism, and ricochet, Roberts bounces back and forth within a multivalent vocabulary."–L.S. Klatt "Jacket Magazine"
