"Burt's imagination is rendered in mellifluous, energetic language in this memorable book." –Publishers Weekly
"The poems in
We Are Mermaids can be skillfully decoded as trans allegories, or climate anxiety, or disgust at U.S. Fascism, but limiting these poems to one reading would miss the pleasures of their inventiveness, their playfulness, their ease at existing in many states at once."
–Robin Arble, Heavy Feather Review "Stephanie Burt's newest collection,
We Are Mermaids, is a time capsule of girlhood, a transfiguration of silence into song, a mermaid's scales rearranged into poems."
–C. E. Janecek, Colorado Review "Oriented toward a queer futurity's potential, these poems rarely land in certainty. . . . Burt reminds us that the surface reflects to the observer just one story, one script, and when we dip below what initially appears, we meet numerous realms and ways of being as mysterious and lovely as the unknown that flourishes on the ocean floor."
–Madeleine Wattenberg, The Georgia Review "The poems in Stephanie Burt's
We Are Mermaids are like modified Fabergé eggs–their bejeweled descriptions crack open to reveal the real yolk of the deeply personal. . . .This is uplifting and transformative work."
–Matthea Harvey
"In poems rich and strange, Stephanie Burt offers us all possible incarnations–what we were, what we weren't, what we might have been, what we may yet be–while honoring what each sacred individual life has always been. . . .This is a poet of dazzling skill, mystical vision, wild imagination, sensual intuition."
–Laura Kasischke "Stephanie Burt's poems are everything at once: thrilling, ferociously charming, effervescently specific about enormous emotions and nerdy passions, as dazzling and illuminating as a photon blast."
–Douglas Wolk, author of All of the Marvels "Stephanie Burt delivers her most intimate and masterful work to date in
We Are Mermaids, a glorious ode to personal dawnings and breaking through the binary to honor our most authentic selves, no matter the struggle to get there, like fish out of water who always knew they belonged to both the water and the air."
–Amber Tamblyn