"The electric immediacy of these poems is an assault on silence, a gunshot fired across the bow of genteel decorous well-mannered lying and silence. At times, but seldom, they give us something sharp-edged but more comfortable (e.g., a portrait of Lauren Bacall choosing fruit). I love how everything here 'haunts us with choice.' This is a superb book."
Frank Bidart
“There’s a certain sorcery in this book ... It gives me enormous pleasure as an anything but ageless reader to introduce and to celebrate these vivid poems. The smiles they compel are taut and tight-lipped, but the language conjuring that pleasure is at once sumptuous and cost-effective, precise and loving.”
Richard Howard
“A wave of spontaneous greeting and implacable fluid motion breaks over these remarkable poems ... What the Right Hand Knows is, like Giotto’s, a perfect circle, ‘the shape of astonishment.’ This is an utterly brilliant and uncommon first book, a voice like no other.”
Carol Muske-Dukes
