Praise for the Original Edition: "The first great rock'n'roll collection to be published since Dylan's Lyrics: 1962-1985." – Salon
"Her influence in music today is undeniable. There's not anybody I know in a band anywhere who does not revere the records she put out. There was a rawness and energy to Horses that I had not heard in any other music. From then on, my life was changed." – Michael Stipe, R.E.M.
"Patti Smith is not only a great performer, she is a shaman–that is, someone in touch with other levels of reality." – William S. Burroughs
"Collected Lyrics shows [Smith's] living energy as words..." – Los Angeles Times
"The shamanic impulse-invocation of spirits, channeling of the voices of dead poets, prayer to unknown forces-pulses through the three hundred pages or so of Smith's Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015..." – New York Review of Books
"To see Smith's galvanizing lyrics on the page, without musical embellishment, is to encounter the essence of her art-the radiant spectrum of her concerns, the razor-edge of her wit, and the depth of her emotions." – Booklist