Riveting . . . Reading this work is truly a joy.–Publishers Weekly
This compilation includes the best of Jarnot's Whitmanesque reflections and Ginsbergian outcries, speech acts that list always toward an avant-garde.–Booklist
Her ideas meddle in the traditions of form, medium, sound, and arrangement to recall the modernism of Joyce and Stein . . . This selection highlights her inventiveness.–Library Journal
Lisa Jarnot's book of joy raises joy in return. It is a poetry of lyric finesse and emotional daring, a rollicking vision of violet skies and walk-along streets, with the walker shamelessly in wonder but–yo!–cagily of the streets.–Aaron Shurin
Joie de Vivre rings out with troubled beauty, ancient lastingness, and a wild lyricism that shares as much with Johnny Cash as with Gertrude Stein and loves Homer even when it thinks like Abbie Hoffman. This work sets the house of American poetry on fire.–Elizabeth Willis
These always strongly oral poems that cry out from the page in sequences that veer between pure whimsy within a spoken word sensibility approach and often surpass art song territory. The crescendo resolution is felt in the extended 'Amedillin Cooperative Nosegay' where the expanse of her well-earned landscape becomes a realized space in proper necessity for the scope of her delightfully unpredictable poetic.–David Henderson
Jarnot's poetry continues to resonate because-after the experimentation and language play-her poems still burst both with feeling and beauty . . . Jarnot finds a way to capture a moment of emotional intensity with and in language, while simultaneously letting that moment retain the mystery and the wonder which it produces.–Joshua Ware, Vouched Books
There's a pop-Romanticism, American to the core, behind the majority of Jarnot's most easily enjoyable verse . . . These poems orbit day to day reality on paths based off non sequiturs and randy loop de loops.–Patrick-James-Dunagan, The Rumpus
Lisa Jarnot possesses both the raw lyrical pathos of Johnny Cash and the complex stylistics of Gertrude Stein . . . –Mike Sonksen, KCET
