"Isabel Duarte-Gray's book is like no other–a text that 'thinks the spell, ' cut-off tales, callings, sudden leaps in lines 'split in two, ' perhaps like this collection itself, splicing carefully through the belly, the heart and the sternum–animals, wives and husbands. You choose. The more you read, the more you scrape and peel through the night fallen–'sniffing for the temperatures of life.' Isabel Duarte-Gray's grasp of deep and perhaps forbidden vernaculars, cultural edges and crossings is profound. The place is underground, underwater, under the crackling structures and somewhere inside abandoned, formless barns in a far-off crimson. An immediate prize-winner. A bold, brave, rare, genius, meticulous, deeper and deeper at work."
– Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus
"The creeks the tears the patriarchy. The Osage orange the intelligible terror. The tiny towns. The no towns at all. The dragonflies the bones the lilies. The difficult ongoing work of recovery. The marriages the handsewn linens the burials. The excess. The shortage. The fear, and the ways to get past that fear. The lists. The anecdotes. The scenes set and dismantled. The herbals the escapees the strings .The listening. That's what you'll find, and it's far from all you'll find, in this strong first collection, a song of songs, an evidence of evidence, a manifestation from places some of us know and many more of us should hear. I give thanks for it."
–Stephanie Burt, author of
Advice from the Lights and
The Poet is You
